


Atonement

by ameliacareful



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Amnesiac Sam, Angst, As much wincest and destiel as there is in the show, Darkness AU, Gen, Hurt Dean Winchester, Hurt Sam Winchester, Latin Grammar, Protective Dean, Protective Sam Winchester, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, The Darkness - Freeform, angels can fly, atonement!sam, possible end of the world
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-22
Packaged: 2018-04-09 19:53:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4362077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ameliacareful/pseuds/ameliacareful
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clouds of The Darkness cover areas of the country causing strange effects.  Amnesia in one place, hundreds of thousands to sleep in another.  Sam and Dean are at the epicenter.  Sam has lost his memory and Dean’s trying to find him.  Crowley wants to stop his mother.  The Angels want to stop the Darkness and think they may need to let Michael and Lucifer out of the Cage to help. </p><p>           * * *</p><p>	Someone else enters the dream.  It’s a guy in a black suit, nicely trimmed beard.  “Moose,” the guy says, British accent.  “This is a fine fuck-up.”</p><p>“I think…this is a dream,” he says.</p><p>“Of course it’s a dream,” the guy says.  “Thanks to your lovely ink I can’t find where you actually are.  Where are you, by the way?”</p><p>“I don’t know.  I’m looking for someone.  I’m pretty sure he’s getting irritated at me for taking so long.”</p><p>“You’re dreaming that Dean is pissed at you?”  The man rolls his eyes.  “Moose, darling, you may have just ended the world and you’re worried that Dean is pissed. Why am I surprised.  Find a crossroads and ring me up, I want to talk about what we’re going to do about Rowena..."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Learning in Latin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Originally posted in July before the start of Season 11, It’s an AU about the Darkness so there’s no Amara and the Darkness is a huge diffuse phenomena rather than an entity.
> 
> In this version, Angels have their wings back and the attack dog spell was much less debilitating. 
> 
> I grew up in a blue collar town and I have Sam and Dean use the kind of language I think hunters would probably use—the language of soldiers and sailors.

 

 

 

 

 _Blue on black_  
_Tears on a river_  
_Push on a shove_  
_It don't mean much_  
_Joker on jack_  
_Match on a fire_  
_Cold on ice_  
_A dead man's touch_  
_Whisper on a scream_  
_Doesn't change a thing_  
_Don't bring you back_

 “Blue on Black” Kenny Wayne Shepherd

 

            He wakes up nameless, his face pressed hard against gravel. He pushes up. He has big hands. He kneels in sharp stone and rises to his feet. He shakes his hair out of his eyes and tucks it back behind his ears. He wakes up no place. A ragged building and a black car and gravel and grass. He is not really aware. There is in him a habit of movement. A habit of needing to do something. A sense that something is undoable but there is nothing but doing. It’s at the core of him, it is who he is. Only rote.

            Something big is happening. Stand up to it, go to it, fix the unfixable. He is trained to head toward the monster. Run toward the fight. To leap into the pool, shoulder into the creature, get in front of the bullet. He jumps into Hell.

            So he gets up. He walks, past the car, the passenger door open like a long jaw. Behind the steering wheel is another man, sprawled unconscious. He doesn’t even really see the car. He sleepwalks.

            His footsteps say _your, fault, your, fault, your, fault,_ as he walks.

           

            He comes back to himself walking. He starts thinking by seeing. He knows lots of things. He can name a lot of the plants he sees in both English and Latin. Queen Anne’s Lace (the roots are edible, wild carrots, although tough and stringy and he doesn’t think he’s really ever had to eat them.) Cornflower, yarrow ( _achillea millefolium_ ) and wild parsley ( _anthriscus sylvestris_ ). He has amnesia. He is probably in a fugue state. He finds he knows a little about fugue states. Sometimes people in fugue states take on a persona, sometimes they just have amnesia. Fugue states are usually transitory and are usually the result of a head injury. He stops and probes his skull with his fingers for sore spots or bumps. His hair is hot from the sun. Nope. He runs his fingers through his long hair. In rare cases, people are just prone to fugue states. Or, it could be a curse. He stops again, rifles through his clothing for a hex bag. He wears nothing but a black watch.

            Wallet…no, nothing in his pockets although he can see the line of wear in the denim of his pocket that shows he usually carries a wallet. No phone, either.

            He looks at the road. At the landscape. It means nothing.

            He was thinking about fugue states. He knows facts. What else will he know? Procedural memory. If he knows how to drive, when he gets behind the wheel of a car, he’ll know what to do. If he knows how to ride a bike or catch a football, he’ll be able to do that.

            He looks at his hands as if they could tell him something but they’re just hands.

            He walks some more and he slips back into that weightless state. He is lonely. He’s very familiar with being lonely. He’s been lonely a long time. It is a chronic ache.

 

            A sound startles him which is when he discovers he is carrying a gun in the waistband of his pants because he turns and finds he has drawn it. Whatever startled him, a crack in the woods, is nothing meaningful. He is familiar with the gun. It’s a Taurus .9mm with a pearl handle. The safety is off, he did that automatically when he pulled it. He clicks the safety on and ejects the clip. The clip is full. He slaps the clip back in. Procedural memory. He is very accustomed to this gun.

 

            He’s really thirsty and somewhat hungry when night falls. He leaves the road and sits against a tree. He falls asleep.

            _He dreams of something vast and brilliant, the morningstar in a dark place, so achingly beautiful and awful. It burns out his eyes and shatters his ears, over and over. It’s the deep blue of radioactive cobalt and he can see it without eyes because it’s radiation and it excites his bare burned optic nerves. He knows it’s real, not some monster invented in a dream and it knows him. He has known it a long, long time. What is unusual is that in the dream he is just looking at it; wings and eyes and strange song too much for humans to contain._

            He wakes in the dark and he’s on his side in the loam, head on his elbow. It takes awhile for his heart to stop pounding, to realize he is not there, he is here. There are twigs under him. Grass. He’s cold. He’s against the tree and the tree roots are under his hip. He drifts back to sleep.

            _Dreams of people he knows. He’s in a hotel and he’s supposed to meet someone. He’s looking for room 416 but he can’t find the hallway with the teens in it. He’s on the second floor looking over the lobby and sees the person he’s looking for, knows his walk, knows his short hair, knows his jacket. The guy he’s looking for looks up and looks exasperated and beckons him to come down but the elevators aren’t where he thought they were and he can’t find the stairs and he knows how impatient the guy gets with him, holy crap does the guy get impatient with him—_

_Someone else enters the dream. It’s a guy in a black suit, nicely trimmed beard. “Moose,” the guy says, British accent. “This is a fine fuck-up.”_

_“I think…this is a dream,” he says._

_“Of course it’s a dream,” the guy says. “Thanks to your lovely ink I can’t find where you actually are. Where are you, by the way?”_

_“I don’t know. I’m looking for someone. I’m pretty sure he’s getting irritated at me for taking so long.”_

_“You’re dreaming that Dean is pissed at you?” The man rolls his eyes. “Moose, darling, you may have just ended the world and you’re worried that Dean is pissed. Why am I surprised. Find a crossroads and ring me up, I want to talk about what we’re going to do about Rowena. I’m going to eat you alive but not right away, even though you tried to KILL me—”_

            He wakes again and it’s dawn.

            He lies thinking about the dream. He’s damp from dew. He tastes the name, ‘Dean.’ He thinks about the two people in the dream, black suit guy and jacket guy. In his dream, jacket guy was ‘Dean.’ He has no idea if that’s true or not. Black suit guy called him ‘Moose’ like it was a nickname.

            Better than nothing.

           He walks again. He finds a gas station and hopes to ask for help but it’s abandoned. He opens the door and the lights are on. He drinks cold bottled water out of the cooler. Then he pours himself some coffee and adds in creamer and sugar. He sips the coffee. The coolers are still humming and they’re full of milk and beer. He eats two containers of Greek yogurt and takes some sandwiches and more water. On a whim he takes some peanut M&Ms.

            He looks out the glass door to the pumps to find out what else he needs but there are no cars at the pumps and he doesn’t know what he’s looking for.

            So he walks.

            His feet hurt.

            About midmorning a military truck comes rumbling down the highway. He wonders if he should be afraid. He has been puzzling at what’s going on. The gas station should have had people in it but on the other hand, if there was some huge catastrophe, the power should have been off. He doesn’t feel afraid.

            A National Guardsman swings off the truck and says, “You’re okay. Do you know your name?” He’s in uniform. Desert beige. Those light colored boots they wear. Boots used to be black. Spit-shined and shit. Was he in the military? He doesn’t think so.

            “No,” he says.

            “Do you have an ID on you?”

            There’s a driver watching, her hand on the gear shift. She’s in camo and has her hair in a pony tail.

            “I don’t have my wallet.”

            The soldier says, “I’m going to take you to a place where there is food and shelter and medical care.”

            “A FEMA camp?” he asks.

            “Yeah,” the soldier says.

            “Is this a natural disaster?”

            The soldier shrugs. “I don’t know what it is.”

            He laughs. “Is the nearest Waffle House still open?” He knows that Waffle Houses are the last places to close in a natural disaster and the first places to open afterwards. They have their own generators. They have disaster plans. So do Walmarts. He doesn’t know how he knows that. The soldier looks at him as if he has three heads. “Never mind,” he says.

            He climbs into the back of the truck. It’s a troop transport and there are six other people in the back; none of them the guy in the jacket or the guy in the black suit.

            He sits down next to a woman with red hair. She sticks out her hand. “I’m Nancy,” she says.

            He shakes it. “I don’t know who I am, but you can call me Moose,” he says.

            There is a round of introductions. Out of six people, four know their names (because they have ID on them) and two are like Moose, completely clueless. The National Guard is sweeping roads, picking up people who have amnesia. One of the Anons (people who don’t know their names are Anons) says that apparently some people just started walking and left all their ID. Most people stayed at their homes.

            Two of the people in the truck weep most of the time. Nancy is holding herself together by organizing and theorizing. She explains what they’ve put together, that they are in Nebraska and that in an area covering Lincoln and some of Kansas something happened. The whole area was covered in darkness for almost a day and when the darkness dispersed, no one in the area knew who they were.

            He listens. Nods. He knows Nebraska, a big state with few roads. Blue highways like veins. Kansas to the south. He has an atlas of the U.S. in his head.

            “Well,” she says.

            He shrugs. “Well, what?”

            “Nobody else has believed it the first time they heard it.”

            “I don’t remember who I am,” he says. “The national guard picked me up. I found a gas station and the power was on and everything was working fine but there were no people in it. So something is strange. Your explanation is as good as any.”

            Two people weeping, three people with the exhausted, empty look of refugees on the evening news, Nancy holding it together by becoming president of the FEMA branch of the neighborhood watch organization.

            How does he feel? Deeply lonely. But that’s so familiar. He has a nagging sense he should be frantic. But he’s not. Mostly he feels kind of empty and light as if he has put something down. Logic says a man who is familiar with a gun and who loses his memory and feels like he has put something down has pretty lousy memories.

            Maybe his slate has been wiped clean.

 

            He is checked in at a FEMA station in an elementary school. This means standing in several lines. First he is handed a water bottle and asked if he is hurt, if he knows his name, if he has any ID. Then he is sent to a line for people who are not hurt, don’t know their name, and don’t have any ID. There he has his fingerprints taken. He knows a lot about getting fingerprints taken. It’s actually harder than people think to get a clean print and he doesn’t want his prints to be clean because that’s a problem so he makes sure that they aren’t. There is a long line and the person who is doing his prints is distracted (he distracts them a little, too, spilling his water, apologizing profusely).

He takes all this knowledge of fingerprints as further proof that he is probably not a person with a great past.

            He stands in another line. He gets his picture taken and gets an ID on a lanyard with his picture and a number and a barcode. The ID will allow him to get food and someplace to sleep. He is ‘in the system.’

            He looks at the ID. He is surprised to see that he’s not that old. He feels old. Not sure how old but somehow he has the sense that he has been around a long, long time.

            He joins a large group of people waiting for shuttles. Refugees. Like him. They are the nameless. It’s expected to be a long wait so he sits down on the ground and puts his head on his knees and closes his eyes.

            He thinks about the Brit in the black suit and the man in the leather jacket and his brain drifts along as he dozes into that place between sleeping and waking and he’s walking and his feet are going _your, fault, your, fault, your, fault_ …

            He starts awake thinking it’s always his fault, other people might do something small but he fucks up on an apocalyptic scale, but he doesn’t know what that means.

&

            Dean rubs his bare forearm. He is Dean Winchester. He lives here in this bunker. He’s not exactly sure how he found his way here, only that he found himself driving, that way that you get to a place and can’t remember the drive, and he was here. The Chevy outside is his car. It doesn’t have a spare because the trunk has been reconfigured as a compartment for weapons and shit. He has his wallet and a wallet for Sam Winchester and a bunch of aliases for both of them and things have gone to shit and he has this nervous habit of rubbing his forearm that he has to quit because he’s rubbing the spot raw and he’s about to drive himself crazy.

            The news is full of this disaster where everyone has lost their fucking memory and he’s one of them. People are supposed to report to local authorities but even if he wasn’t sitting in a secret bat cave full of weird shit from the forties, with an awesome car full of weird weapons that he knows like the back of his hand parked out front, Dean is pretty sure he would not be reporting to some asshole who would be explaining to him that he should have two weeks worth of bottled water and a flashlight in case of a tornado and offering him a granola bar.

            Earlier, the phone rang and people asked him what the fuck was going on and was he all right. He told them he didn’t know what was going on and he was fine, thanks and after the fifth guy called he pulled the cord out of the wall.

            There’s a sound, like wings, and then there’s a guy in a trench coat.

            “Dean,” the man says.

            “How did you get in here!” Dean says but he is also weirdly not surprised.

            “You don’t remember me,” the man says.

            “Nobody in the state remembers anything.”

            “So you don’t know what happened,” the man says.

            “That would follow, genius.” The guy’s weird. Sort of obvious. A little ‘special needs’.

            The man walks up and before Dean can do anything he puts two fingers on Dean’s forehead and

            _everything_

_expands_

_and changes_

            “Holy shit, Cas,” Dean says, reeling. “Fuck, warn a guy!” He puts his fingers to his forehead but really what he feels like is someone just rewired his vision and that even though what used to be red is now blue he can still think of it as red.

            “You need coffee,” Castiel says and heads for the kitchen.

            He needs something stronger than coffee. “Cas,” he says. “CAS!”

            Castiel turns around.

            “I almost killed Sam,” Dean grates out. Sam on his knees; his damn, miserable brother looking up at him letting him go ahead. Giving him his blessing to take his head off his shoulders to save the world. What the fuck, Sam.

            “I killed Death,” whispers Dean. The moment of Death crumbling.

            “That remains to be seen,” Castiel says. “You have certainly done something.”

            “The…darkness thingy, that’s…” Dean narrows his eyes, “not a good thing, right?”

            Castiel stands there looking inscrutably Cas-like. Or utterly obliviously Cas-like, depending on your point of view.

            “Where’s Sam?” He left Sam at the restaurant. Wait, there wasn’t anybody at the restaurant, just Sam’s wallet. How the hell did he drive back here? Instinct? “Can you find Sam?”

            “Not with the sigils carved in his ribs. He isn’t answering his phone. You should have coffee and food and then we’ll look for him. I must tell you some things about Crowley and Rowena.”

            Dean tries to put things together. The Darkness thing; Sam said something about it. But Sam was saying that everything was good, that the Mark was gone and he had his Baby back and…now Sam’s in the wind not knowing who he is and Sam hasn’t been in a good headspace since, well, honestly, years, and half of Nebraska has amnesia. Death is dead and Cas doesn’t seem to think that’s the most important thing on the list which means that there are bigger fish to fry.

            Just once he’d like to bored. Maybe ten minutes.

            Castiel makes coffee.

            “On a scale of one to ten, how screwed up are we?” Dean asks.

            “If the apocalypse is a ten,” Castiel says, “this is a twenty. Do you want ham or turkey on your sandwich?”

 

            The rumble of the Impala is reassuring. It should be Sam in the passenger seat but Cas is better than nobody. “So Rowena made you into an angelic attack dog,” Dean says. “You went all rabid on Crowley’s ass.”

            “Yes,” Castiel says.

            “And he’s still alive?” Dean asks.

            “Crowley is the King of Hell. He is hard to kill,” Castiel says, looking out the windshield. He doesn’t seem inclined to elaborate. Dean is pretty sure there is a story there. He is really itching to know it. Or maybe not.

            “And then?”

            “The spell wore off and I found you in the Bunker.”

            “Are you all right?” Dean asks.

            “I am fine, thank you, Dean.”

            “Rowena has _The Book of the Damned_. And that’s not even a major problem right now.” Dean is trying to prioritize. “This is…you know, I remember when all we did was salt and burns, cut the heads off stuff, shoot the occasional werewolf. I remember when the FBI was a big deal.” Issues about Dad were a big deal. They had a clear mission. Find Yellow Eyes, revenge mom and Jess. Then they would be two guys on the road doing their thing.

            “Okay,” Dean says. “We find Sam. We figure out what The Darkness is. While we are researching that, we can also think about Crowly’s mommy issues. Can _The Book of the Damned_ help with The Darkness?”

            “It is possible. Sam has Charlie’s files on his phone and laptop.”

            Charlie. Dean can not think about Charlie. “First, we go to the restaurant and start looking for Sam.”


	2. Criminals and Serial Killers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Sorry I don’t remember you,” Sam says. This is a dream so none of this may be true. There are ways for people to enter dreams, African root. He knows this, which is probably not something most people know. He knows this the way he knows about sycamore trees and wild carrots: it’s a fact. He wonders if he’s ever done it or if someone’s ever done it to him, if they’re really doing it now. Castiel is a strange name.
> 
> “Can you tell us how to find you?” Castiel asks.
> 
> He thinks about the gun he carries. He thinks about being lonely. “Are we criminals?” he asks.
> 
> Castiel tilts his head slightly.
> 
> Sam explains, “It’s just that I’ve got a gun and I clearly know how to use it. I was just thinking that most people aren’t like that. So I figured maybe…you know, I was a criminal.”
> 
> “You have done many things that break the law,” Castiel says. “If that’s what you’re asking.”

 

 

 

            He’s with a bus full of other people who don’t know who they are. They are the fit, non-crazy people who don’t know who they are. A lot of the Anons are obviously homeless or troubled and those people have been taken somewhere else. But there’s a couple of busloads of people like him who are just…Anons. Anonymous. More men than women. They end up at an old church in a small empty town. The church is run down. It’s hastily being converted into a shelter. The actual church is Lutheran, an old white building with a tall steeple that points like a stern finger towards the heavens.

            Beside the church is a long low building made of white painted block with rooms for Sunday school and a church kitchen. He helps set up cots in the Sunday school rooms and works with another guy to board up a broken window. He can use a hammer and nails just fine. Can cut wood, use a table saw. He’s not super familiar. He’s done it, he guesses, but it’s not like he’s a construction worker. Or been one. Not that construction workers usually carry guns so that’s no surprise.

            The other guy calls himself Twelve because that’s the last two numbers of his ID. “I think I’ve worked in fast food,” Twelve says.

            “Yeah?’ he says.

            “Yeah. Cause the kitchen doesn’t look right. But in a way that says there is a right, you know?” Twelve has a narrow face. He’s somewhere between twenty and forty, depending on what kind of life he’s led.

            “Maybe you should volunteer for kitchen duty, flip some burgers?” he suggests.

            Twelve shrugs. “What about you, Moose. Anything familiar?”

            He shakes his head. It is all familiar, a little. The sycamore trees. The sound of insects at the tall grass and weeds beyond the mown lawn. The way the humid air of the afternoon makes him sweat. The smell of gasoline from the bus.

            They eat FEMA sandwiches at dinner and some people are like Twelve, trying to piece together what they might be. Some are like him, willing to let things lie.

            He claims a cot in a corner near a window. Guarded by walls on both sides but with easy escape.

            _He’s dreaming of the highway, being in a car, driving, being driven, some state in between. Except someone is framing a house in the back of the car because it’s one of those dreams that is just a dream, not even a nightmare, just a jumble, when it settles into clarity, a Chevy Impala specific in every detail. He’s driving._

_There’s a guy in the passenger seat with very dark hair. He’s dressed in a suit and a trench coat and he looks over. He has very startling blue eyes._

_He says, “Sam.”_

_“Hi?” It’s clear that this dream has just taken a turn in a way that he should be familiar with. “Is Sam my name?”_

_“Yes,” says the guy, “Your name is Sam Winchester. Your brother Dean and I are looking for you. Where are you?”_

_He shrugs and puts his attention back on the road, “Some FEMA camp for people who don’t know who they are.”_

_“Are you all right?”_

_This is interesting both because the guy is very weird and also because his weirdness doesn’t feel weird. “Who are you?” Sam asks._

_“Castiel. We’re friends.”_

_“Sorry I don’t remember you,” Sam says. This is a dream so none of this may be true. There are ways for people to enter dreams, African root. He knows this, which is probably not something most people know. He knows this the way he knows about sycamore trees and wild carrots: it’s a fact. He wonders if he’s ever done it or if someone’s ever done it to him, if they’re really doing it now. Castiel is a strange name._

_“Can you tell us how to find you?” Castiel asks._

_He thinks about the gun he carries. He thinks about being lonely. “Are we criminals?” he asks._

_Castiel tilts his head slightly._

_Sam explains, “It’s just that I’ve got a gun and I clearly know how to use it. I was just thinking that most people aren’t like that. So I figured maybe…you know, I was a criminal.”_

_“You have done many things that break the law,” Castiel says. “If that’s what you’re asking.”_

_“So we’re criminals.”_

_“I am an angel of the Lord,” Castiel says. “There’s a war in heaven. I would say that makes me more of a rebel than a criminal.”_

_Angels are dicks, Sam thinks._

            He startles awake. The cot’s too short and too narrow. His feet hang off the end. He needs to find an internet connection. He wonders if his name might really be Sam Winchester.

#

            Dean is asleep in the front seat of the Impala when Castiel is suddenly in the back seat. He startles awake. “Fuck. Cas.” It’s dark. The Impala is in the parking lot of the Mexican restaurant where Dean killed Death. He can’t see Castiel very well but he can feel him looking at him because, well, fucking Cas.

            “I talked to Sam,” Castiel says.

            “Where is he?”

            “He says he’s in a FEMA camp for people who don’t know who they are.”

            Dean runs his hands through his hair. That narrows it down. “Did he say where.”

            “No.”

            “How did he seem?”

            “It was a dream, but he seemed calm.”

            “Not…you know,” Dean says.

            “Not disturbed. His mind seems clear.”

            “Okay. Okay.” Dean opens the driver’s door and puts on his shoes. He walks to the edge of the lot and takes a piss. He takes a couple of deep breaths. He should be used to seraphim alarm clocks. Really.

            He turns around and Castiel is right behind him. Well, three feet behind him which would normally be fine but…

            “Dude,” he says tiredly. “A little space when a guy is pissing. You were human for awhile.”

            “I told him we were looking for him,” Castiel says, unperturbed. “He asked me if we were criminals. This seemed important to him.”

            “He what?” Dean said. “You said he seemed okay!”

            “He said he had a gun and I believe he made the logical leap that most people do not usually carry guns.” It’s actually good that Cas can follow this kind of thinking. It’s just that it’s Sam. It’s hard to see Castiel clearly in the darkness.

            Dean’s mind spins. “What did you say?”

            “I said that he had done many things that people would consider breaking the law.”

            Everything in Dean goes cold. Everything shuts down. Above him the stars stop. He doesn’t know what it means yet for Sam but he’s sure Sam is connecting dots and not in a good way. “You told Sam he was a criminal?” he asks.

            “You have both done many things, stolen cars, broken into places—” Castiel said calmly.

            “But you told him he’s a good guy, right?” Dean says.

            “After that, he woke up,” Castiel says.

            Castiel has just told Sam that he’s a bad man. And Sam has nothing and no one to give him any evidence to the contrary. Sam is pretty much convinced he’s still a bad guy when he’s leaping into Hell to stop the apocalypse.

            “Oh fuck.” Dean said.

 

            About 6:00 am they find a gas station open. It’s lit and shining, all glass and green in the early morning. It’s so normal it breaks your heart. They stop and gas up. Dean gets coffee. The girl behind the cash register smiles and says, “Hi, you a local?” She’s about twenty and cute with straight brown hair, broad Nebraska hips.  She has a handwritten name badge that says Sarah.

            Just passing through,” Dean says, smiles at her because she’s smiling at 6:00am and people ought to get a medal for that.

            “Okay,” she says. “I’m local. Trying to learn all the people here again.” Right. Because nobody remembers anybody else. Neighbors. Bosses.

            Next to the cash register is a photo of a toddler. It’s one of those Olin Mills photos against a country scene backdrop, with a little blond girl in a K-Mart shirt with Scotties on it.

            Cute kid,” Dean says.

            Sarah looks at the photo and Dean sees a moment of total terror in her eyes before she grins and hides it. “Yep, that’s my little girl,” she says. She’s wearing a wedding band. Dean wonders what it’s like to be married to a stranger and have a child you don’t recognize. Then he tries not to think about it. The coffee makes him jittery without making him feel less tired. He tries to think about when was the last time he wasn’t tired. He wonders if being a demon actually counts.

 

            The FEMA station is a nightmare. He has to park the Impala in a field. Everyone stares at Cas. Okay, everyone usually stares at Cas and Cas doesn’t really seem to care and most of the time Dean doesn’t either but these are people in army uniforms. People are standing in lines. Really, Dean doesn’t do lines.

            Trucks are rolling in. Trucks are rolling out.

            He finds a line that says ‘Locating Relatives’. There are already people in waiting at 8:30 in the morning. In front of Dean and Cas is a middle-aged couple.

            If you had Verizon we could check the website,” the woman says. She’s maybe fifty-something, very thin; her hair is so blond it’s almost white and she is wearing a lot of make-up. She looks high maintenance. Expensive mall, brand name kind of high maintenance.

            The website crashed,” the man says. “It doesn’t matter if I can get bars or not.”

            Excuse me,” Dean says, “What website?”

            The woman turns, ready to explain to Dean, happy to be an expert. “There’s a website where you can look to see if your missing relative has been registered,” she says. “It’s on the FEMA site. But Verizon has terrible coverage so you can’t get it out here.” The man rolls his eyes. He’s very tan. Dean suspects he plays golf and works in an office with a very large desk and terrorizes his secretary. “We drove in from Nevada,” she explains. “We’re trying to find my mother.”

            Dean has his phone out, he’s trying to get the FEMA website.

            We are looking for his brother,” Castiel explains. “He is at a FEMA camp for people who don’t know who they are but we don’t know where that is.”

            Well, none of them know who they are, right?” says the woman.

            "Apparently, some people did not have identification,” Castiel says. “Not only do they not know who they are but no one else does either.”

            The man and woman look at each other and you can tell that they suddenly feel a lot better about their situation.

#

            There is a team setting up to do a medical check of the Anons. Then they will take a new photo for a special FEMA website to see if people can identify them. He’s really not sure he wants a photo or even a medical check. In the morning, before the team got there he spent a little time examining himself in the bathroom. Just checking things like his teeth. He believes that there are angels and that they come and talk to him in his dreams and really, that’s not exactly a sign of good mental health. In the bathroom he figured out that he was in good physical health. His teeth are good. He’s broken some bones and had some stitches but he appears to have had reasonable medical care. He looks like he’s lived hard but not homeless. Not institutionalized. So if he’s psychotic it’s either recent or he’s been well supervised.

            When the team gets there he manages to steal a phone from a blood tech. He’s sorry to do it. The guy is really good a finding a vein. He learns he is not squeamish about having blood drawn but that it makes him nervous the way having his fingerprints taken makes him nervous; like it will identify him somehow.

            He hides in the church with the stolen phone and Googles Sam Winchester and ‘criminal’.

            Oh yes. Sam Winchester. Brother to Dean Winchester. They are on lists with people like Charles Manson and Jeffrey Daumer. They conducted a killing spree across the US. They have a body count. They are supposed to be dead (although he doesn’t feel even remotely dead.) There is a famous video taken in a diner of the brothers making a kid record them murdering everyone and at the end they shoot the kid. There are webpages dedicated to them. Conspiracy theories about Dean’s double deaths.

            He watches the video and it’s clearly him but it doesn’t feel as if he’s watching himself. Of course, it doesn’t exactly feel like he knows himself when he’s looking at himself in a mirror, but this is different. He can feel like he might be connected to the man in the bathroom mirror but the man with the gun in the video, well, he feels no connection to him at all. But there he is. Sam Winchester.

            Monster.

            Sam leaves the phone on the floor of the empty church and walks out the back and into the woods. He’s not sure what he’s going to do, or what to do, so he walks. He’s…the word isn’t gutted because he has a different sense of that (an oddly visceral sense, really involving immense pain and what it means to feel your body cavity and a knowledge that it takes a long time to get interior nerves to map to sensations the way the nerves on skin are because interior nerves aren’t exposed to a lot of sensations like air. Normally.) He feels so much it’s as if he doesn’t feel anything. He would have thought not knowing who he was would be pretty overwhelming but it hasn’t been so awful. He still felt like a person. He didn’t know who he was.

            Now he doesn’t know what he is.

 

            “Hello?” the girl calls. She is young, high school age, wearing jeans and a shirt with baby doll sleeves. She has streaks of teal in her brown hair.

            He stops, hands open and empty at his sides and does his best to not look like a giant serial killer.

            “Hello?” she says again. She is standing in an area of cabins. It’s a camp ground. Camp Mishi-something. He saw the sign and decided to check it out, hoping to find a kitchen he could raid for water and food. He’s down to two water bottles. He didn’t expect anybody to be there.

            “Hi,” he says. “I’m Sam. Are you okay?”

            “Yes?” she says. “No!” And she starts crying. Sobbing, actually, girl-type hiccoughing sobs. “I don’t know who I am! I can’t remember anything!”

            “It’s okay,” he says. “It’s happened to a bunch of people. I can get you help, get you home.”

            Her name is Brenna. She knows because it’s sewn into her clothes. She hasn’t seen anyone in three days. There’s no power in the camp and she has a phone but it doesn’t have a charge. He gives her a water bottle and makes her take sips. “If you haven’t had anything to drink for awhile you’ll get sick if you drink fast,” he says.

            “I ran out yesterday,” she says. They are sitting at a picnic table. “There’s a Coke machine but I couldn’t find any money and the power is out. I was afraid to drink from the stream because of giardia.”

            He smiles. “You know, dying of thirst will kill you before giardia.” They probably taught them not to drink from streams at the camp, taught them about giardia, the intestinal parasite. People remember facts.

            She nods.

            “Do you remember who you are?” she asks.

            “No,” he says. “But the National Guard is helping people. We’ll get you help.”

            He had been thinking about what he should do, about what he was. His first instinct had been to walk away but then he had been thinking that if he was dangerous maybe he should go back and be caught. Be put in a Supermax or something. He’d thought about the punishment he’d deserved but really he’d felt no desire to be punished. He wanted…to atone…but he wasn’t sure there was a way to atone for that.

            If he couldn’t atone he had to figure out if he was dangerous or not. He had no desire to hurt this girl, at least not right now. But he had hurt people once. Either that feeling, the way he was when he killed those people, was gone or sometimes he was dangerous and sometimes he wasn’t dangerous. If he was dangerous sometimes then he really had to make sure he didn’t hurt anyone again.

            More information would really help but he didn’t know how to get that. Except in dreams and that didn’t seem like the most reliable form of research.

            “Is there any food here?” he asks. “Is there a kitchen?”

            “There’s a Coke machine and a candy machine,” Brenna says. “But you know, no electricity so they don’t work even if you have money.”

            Sam shrugs. “I don’t think that’s a problem. Let’s find a paperclip.”

            They find a paperclip in one of the cabins. Then he picks the lock on the Coke machine. He likes picking locks. It’s weirdly soothing. Closing his eyes, feeling the world through his fingertips. He swings the machine open.

            “Whoa,” Brenna says. “I’ve never seen the inside of a soda machine. Dude.” She pulls out a Coke.

            “That stuff will rot your teeth,” he says and grabs a water. He pulls the dollar bills but leaves the quarters.

            “I haven’t had caffeine in three days,” she says. “I’m dying.”

            He picks the lock on the candy machine. It’s the kind that has the corkscrew dispensers. They pull peanut butter cups and potato chips and junk pastries and cookies and carry them over to the picnic table.

            “Can you teach me how to do that?” she asks.

            “I can but it takes a lot of practice.”

            “Who taught you?” she asks.

            He shrugs. “I don’t remember. Maybe I learned off the internet.”

            “So you don’t remember either?” she asks. “How do you know your name?”

            “I dreamed it,” he says.

            She looks at him for a moment. She has brown eyes. “That’s kind of awesome.” She eats a peanut butter cup.

 

            She talks a lot. It is equal parts annoying and nice. She doesn’t know how old she is and it is driving her nuts. “I’ve gotta be older than fifteen, right? I mean, you think I’m older than fifteen? I know, you said you’re not a good judge of age, but really!”

            “You can remember facts, right?” he points out. “And you know how to do things.” They are walking, looking for a house or gas station or anything. He’s looking for a car. He’s pretty sure he can hotwire one.

            “Like what?” she asks.

            “Do you know French?” he asks. “Or Spanish? Or Japanese?”

            “ _Domo arigato_ ,” she says. “ _Watashi no namae wa Brenna desu_.” She covers her mouth, giggling. “That’s ‘my name is Brenna,’ in Japanese.”

            He holds his hands up as if to say, ‘see?’ “So, do you know how to drive a car?”

            She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

            He stops. “Close your eyes and picture a steering wheel. Imagine turning on the engine. Do you know where your feet go?”

            She closes her eyes. They pop open wide and she’s looking at him. “Accelerator! Brake! I know how to drive!”

            “You’re at least sixteen.”

            “Awesomesauce,” she says. Then immediately. “I wonder what kind of parents I’ve got. I bet they’re divorced. Don’t you think? Divorced parents tend to dump their kids at summer camp.”

            “Or maybe not because don’t kids of divorce spend summer with the non-custodial parent?”

            She considers that. Shakes her head. “Nah, not teenagers,” she says. “By that time they’re like way over the whole custody thing and have like second wives and shit. And you can tell I’m a pain in the ass. Look at my hair and my earrings. I wonder if I’m vegetarian.” Brenna has four earrings in one ear and five in the other.

            He nods as if this is a sign of total delinquency. To him it just looks like she has spent serious time in a mall but he doesn’t think he really knows that much about teenagers.

            “Oh God, what if I’m vegan and I screwed it up with all that stuff we ate?” she asks.

            He listens with one ear as she talks herself out of being vegan.

            Part of him keeps thinking about that other Sam. The one in the video. What he would do to this girl. He has to get Brenna to the FEMA camp as quickly as possible. He doesn’t feel like there is any trace of that other Sam in him at all but he’s seen it on that video. Maybe he’s bipolar. Maybe something triggers it.

            He talks to angels.

            He has a gun and he will use it on himself if he feels any threat of that coming on him. If, of course, he can in time.


	3. Meminisse: To Remember

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He sees a boy standing at the end of a long driveway that leads to a house, t-shirt fluttering like a flag in the wind. Behind the house is a dirty white barn and a tall silo. The boy looks about twelve and he’s standing like he’s waiting for a bus, for all that it’s chilly and he’s got no jacket or suitcase. He doesn’t wave but when Dean slows down he can see that the boy is barely holding it together.
> 
> “Hi buddy. I’m Dean. You need some help?”
> 
> “Yeah,” the boy says. He’s shivering. He licks his lips. He’s a knobby redhead with long hair.
> 
> “What’s wrong,” Dean says, careful.
> 
> “You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” the boy says.
> 
> “I probably won’t,” Dean says.
> 
> “My mom is in the house but she’s not really my mom anymore.”

 

 

 

            The Impala ticks in the gravel parking lot of the church, engine cooling from the drive. It’s late afternoon and long shadows fall across the grass from the trees.

            Dean is on his third shelter for people who don’t know who they are. This one is an old church in a little town. Cas has taken off again to do angel business which sucks because having Cas around being weirdly Cas is distracting in a good sort of way.

            “Hi,” he says to the first guy he sees. “Who’s in charge here?”

            The guy shrugs. “Right now, nobody,” he says. “People come out and check on us but we’re the non-crazies so we’re running things ourselves a bit.” The last shelter was full of street people. There was a lot of detoxing and yelling and scrambling to figure out medication. Dean would have liked to see Cas interacting with crazy people. Cas doesn’t distinguish between schizophrenics and non-schizophrenics. Sometimes Cas doesn’t distinguish between people and cats.

            “Yeah,” Dean says, “I’m looking for my brother.” He pulls out one of the IDs he has of Sam. “You seen this guy? About yea tall?” He holds his hand a foot over his head.

            The guy takes the ID. “Moose! Yeah. He was here. He just disappeared this morning.”

            “Moose?” Dean asks, skin crawling.

            “Yeah, Moose. That’s what he called himself. I’m Twelve.” He points to a boarded up window. “We boarded up that window yesterday. Nice guy. Really tall.”

            Dean nods. “He disappeared? Like someone came and got him?”

            Twelve shakes his head. “Nah, nothing like that. He was kind of standoffish, you know? Shy, I guess. This morning they were taking pictures and stuff and I could tell he wasn’t real comfortable with all that. I think he just left.”

            “Fuck,” Dean says. “Look. If he comes back, you call me, okay? Don’t even tell him, just call me.” Dean goes out to the Impala and digs in the glove box, finds a business card for a place that replaces windshields, writes his phone number on the back. “He’s a good guy, okay?” he tells Twelve. “Served his country. Did a number on him.”

            Twelve nods. “Wow, man, I had no idea.”

            “Maybe you did, too,” Dean says.

            Twelve blinks. “Fuck.” He snorts. “Probably not. I think I did a number on myself all by myself.”

            Dean pulls out his wallet. Shoves three twenties in the guy’s hand. “I hope things work out for you. If anyone else comes looking for my brother, call me.”

            “I don’t have a phone,” Twelve says.

            “Maybe you can borrow one,” Dean says. “Please. Get in touch. If you need something, call me.”

            Moose. That means Crowley. How did Crowley find Sam?

            He climbs into the Impala, starts driving. Sam’s on the move. Why the fuck are you running, Sam? Why do you always run? He knows his brother so he tries to think where he would go. Sam would end up following a road because thrashing through underbrush is exhausting and since Dean hadn’t passed him yet, the best thing to do is keep going on the road.

            There is a flutter of wings. “Where the hell have you been?” Dean asks.

            “My father and the archangels defeated The Darkness a long time ago,” Castiel says. “But then there were Michael, Lucifer, Raphael, Gabriel, so many who are now dead or locked away.”

            “What’s it doing?”

            Castiel shakes his head. “It’s not doing anything.” He turns those brilliant blue eyes on Dean. “We’re trying to plan.”

            The Impala fires up, throaty and angry. “Sam was here,” Dean says to Cas. The rear wheels snarl on the gravel of the lot. “He was calling himself Moose.”

 

            Castiel leaves. The angels are having some kind of committee meeting about The Darkness and Castiel gets to attend. It is a big deal for the guy since he doesn’t get to go to Heaven anymore. Dean’s glad for Cas but he figures it’ll be like C-Span with angels.

            He drives the roads around the FEMA camp, hoping to catch Sam hitching. Dean doesn’t have to go far to hit prairie. It’s empty farmland for miles. The only trees are planted either next to a house or in long fence lines to stop the wind. He feels flattened by that immensity of the land and the sky. Even 6’4” of Sam would be small out here. He plays his music loud and the weight of all the Impala’s Detroit iron is what keeps him from blowing away.

            He sees a boy standing at the end of a long driveway that leads to a house, t-shirt fluttering like a flag in the wind. Behind the house is a dirty white barn and a tall silo. The boy looks about twelve and he’s standing like he’s waiting for a bus, for all that it’s chilly and he’s got no jacket or suitcase. He doesn’t wave but when Dean slows down he can see that the boy is barely holding it together.

            “Hi buddy. I’m Dean. You need some help?”

            “Yeah,” the boy says. He’s shivering. He licks his lips. He’s a knobby redhead with long hair.

            “What’s wrong,” Dean says, careful.

            “You’re gonna think I’m crazy,” the boy says.

            “I probably won’t,” Dean says.

            “My mom is in the house but she’s not really my mom anymore.”

 

            The boy’s name is Caleb—a name that Dean associates with another Caleb, a hunter who’s been dead years now. Caleb and his mom found their names out in their own house and in the first few days figured out what happened from the television. They decided to sit tight and take care of the livestock. There’s two hundred head of Black Angus cattle here. (Caleb explains how weird it is to know what to do even if he can’t remember anything.) So for the last couple of days, he and his mom would get in the pick-up and load up some hay and check on the cattle. Make sure the water was pumping and hope that they didn’t need a vet or anything because they figured no vet was going to answer the phone.

            Then a few hours ago he came into the kitchen and he said his mom was a different person.

            “Different, how?”

            “It’s hard to describe,” Caleb says. “I mean, she knew all the stuff like my name and how to act but it was like she was pretending. She was just kinda mean. She kept saying strange stuff like she wanted to creep me out. She remembered everything that she didn’t remember before, you know, like I don’t remember. Stuff about my Dad in Afghanistan. I asked her why she was being so weird and she said she was waiting for someone. I said she wasn’t acting like my mom and she said maybe I had the brains of a cockroach and her voice was different and I just… I just could tell. You know?”

            “Did you smell anything?” Dean asks. “Like rotten eggs?”

            “Yeah!” the boy says. “I did! How did you know that?”

            Dean gets the boy out of the wind and into the passenger seat of the Impala. They’re sitting plain as day at the end of the driveway and Dean feels exposed. He goes around the back and pops the truck. He pulls holy water, the demon blade, and a shot gun. He’s got a phone with a recording of Sam doing the exorcism on a loop. He gets a hex bag that protects against exorcism.

            He gets in the driver’s seat, unscrews the top of a flask and hands it to Caleb.

            “Take a drink,” he says.

            “I’m only thirteen,” Caleb says, looking at the flask like it’s a Justin Beiber CD.

            “It’s water,” Dean says.

            Caleb dutifully takes a drink of holy water.

            Dean is relieved. Possessed kids drive him nuts. He hands the boy the hex bag. “Put this on. DON’T take it off.”

            The boy puts the leather over his head and the hex bag hangs to the middle of his chest.

            “You can tuck it under your t-shirt,” Dean says. “It will protect you from being possessed.”

            “Is my mom possessed?”

            Dean nods.

            “By what?”

            What’s the right answer? He knew about monsters by thirteen. So did Sam. As Sam loved to point out, when he thought there was a monster in the closet, dad had given him .45.

            “Is my mom possessed by the devil?” Caleb asks. Of course. Kansas is the buckle of the Bible belt.

            Dean shakes his head. “No,” he says. “But your mom has a demon in her. I can drive it out. It’s what I do.”

            Caleb looks Dean up and down. It’s pretty clear that Caleb doesn’t expect someone who can drive a demon out to look like Dean or drive a’67 Chevy Impala. Probably thinks he should be a Bible Belt preacher. But hey, any port in a storm.

 

            There’s no chance of sneaking up on it. Dean just pulls up the driveway and parks by the house. The Impala is warded. “Caleb,” he says, “I want you to stay in the car. No matter what.”

            Caleb looks at the shotgun. “Are you gonna shoot my mom?” he asks. The kid’s voice is remarkably steady. Country kids know from death. They know from hunting. They know from cattle getting injured and having to be put down or being loaded to go to slaughter.

            “The shells are filled with rock salt,” Dean says.

            Caleb nods. Dean is pretty sure Caleb knows that the demon knife can be fatal.

            Dean feels like he can’t just say to this kid that everything is going to be all right. “I’m going to do everything I can to walk out of that house with your mom, okay?”

            Caleb nods again.

            Dean refills the flask with holy water and hands it to Caleb. “When I come out, you splash this on my face and hands. Bare skin, you got me?” Dean says. “It’s holy water and you’ll know from how I react if I’m possessed or not. If I react, don’t get out of the car. The car has protections in the door panels and the roof to keep you safe.”

            Caleb takes the flask. “Is that why you made me drink it? To see if I was possessed?”

            Dean nods.

            “Okay,” Caleb says, very quiet.

            Dean wants to say something comforting but really it’s better if the kid is scared. For all Dean knows he’s going to have to shoot the kid’s mom. The front door of the house is not locked. He unlatches the door, has holy water in his left hand and shot gun in his right, and pushes it open with his foot.

            The living room is empty. It’s carpeted and has those almost see through white curtains. There’s a nice blue couch and a coffee table and two matching chairs. No one ever uses this room, he guesses. There’s a stairwell in front of him. Off to the right is a dining room with a hutch full of china and glasses. Another room that probably only gets used on Christmas and Thanksgiving. There’s a dinky little bathroom with only a toilet and sink and those pretty little towels no one is supposed to touch.

            Dean stalks the hallway to the kitchen. The back of the house is where everybody lives. That’s where she’s waiting. She’s sitting in the living room on the big comfy brown sectional sofa. There’s a fireplace and a big screen TV. The kitchen has nice cabinets and marble countertops. She looks like she’s a few years older than Dean. She’s got thick brown hair and wears mom jeans and when she was twenty she was probably gorgeous. Now she’s practical, a woman Dean’s seen pushing a shopping cart in hundreds of groceries.

            “Dean Winchester!” she says. “Wasn’t expecting you.”

            “Who were you expecting?”

            “Your addled brother,” she says and her eyes snick black and then normal again. “You seen him anywhere?”

            “What do you want with Sam?” he asks.

            “Of course you haven’t,” she says. “If you had, you wouldn’t be driving up and down the ass end of Nebraska, would you. Well, don’t worry, one of us will find him. We’ll let you know when we do.”

            Dean says again, his voice low and dark, “What do you want with Sam?”

            “Me?” says the demon. “Not my type, really. I’m Team Dean.” She bends forward and blows him a kiss. “But apparently Crowley is all Team Moose after the way you acted when you were a demon.”

            Dean says, “I’ll ask one more time,” and splashes her with holy water.

            She screams and snarls at him. “Fuck you Winchester,” she says, “I’m not staying around for you to send me back to hell,” and throws back her head and belches black smoke.

            The woman collapses. Dean kneels and touches her neck. Her pulse is strong. After a moment the woman blinks. “Oh my God,” she whispers. She looks at Dean. “Oh God, please don’t hurt me.”

            “I’m not going to hurt you,” Dean says. “What’s your name?”

            “Marie,” she says. “Where’s Caleb, is he all right?” She comes up off the couch. “CALEB?!”

            “He’s all right,” Dean says. “Do you remember what happened?”

            “I…sort of.”

            “Do you know what it wanted?”

            “To… to take someone named Sam to her… boss?” she says. “Oh God. I feel sick. Where’s Caleb?”

#

            They find a house, a long low brick ranch house with a barn behind it, a John Deer tractor, green and yellow, parked beside it. There’s a gray half-ton Ford pick-up in the driveway. Twenty acres of corn, long harvested, dry stubble rattling in the evening wind.

            “What are we doing?” Brenna asks. She’d been quiet for awhile, worn down by walking.

            “We’re going to see if anyone’s home,” he says. He has been unable to stop thinking about if…what kind of person he is like. He feels calm. He feels worried about Brenna. Psychopaths don’t care about other people but maybe they think they do. Psychopaths don’t know that they’re psychopaths. Maybe the calm is not real, maybe he’s on thin ice.

            He checks the mailbox. It’s empty, no junk mail. Is mail delivery suspended during the emergency or is someone home? If someone is home he’ll have them call the authorities to pick up Brenna and he’ll keep walking. (Give yourself up. Everyone imprisoned in a Supermax goes crazy but going crazy in a Supermax is better than hurting someone else.)

            They walk up the driveway and he feels exposed. Nebraska is not an easy place, so much of it is flat farmland with no cover. He likes the wind, though, restless this evening.

            “What if no one’s home?” Brenna asks.

            “Then we’ll camp here,” he says. “Tomorrow we’ll get you to the FEMA camp.” He’ll hotwire the truck. He can see it in his head, what to do. The truck is a couple of years old. American made. That pleases him more than if it had been an import for some reason.

            He knocks on the door. No one answers. He scouts around the house and sees nothing. There is a big deck with a grill in back and a sliding glass door. He checks the slider. Easiest doors to open. There’s no brace or stick in the track holding the door shut so he simply pops it off the latch and slides it open. He wants to pull his gun but that feels wrong. If there is someone inside afraid to answer the door, they really don’t need to be confronted by some big guy with a gun who hasn’t shaved and has been wearing the same clothes for three days.

            The dining room is decorated in country kitsch. There are four bedrooms. There’s a basement, converted into a television/family room. The power is out. The water is out as well. Out here they are probably on well water but the pump is probably electric.

            He opens the front door. “No one home,” he says to Brenna.

            She walks in. Her shoulders are tense. “This is really creepy, dude.”

            “Better than sleeping outside,” he points out. He could drive tonight, the FEMA camp couldn’t be that far. He couldn’t have walked that far in one day and Brenna slowed him down even more.

            He wants a night to think before he decides whether to turn himself in. Maybe he’ll keep the truck and drive awhile. Maybe he’ll dream.

 

            The kitchen is fully stocked. He warns Brenna not to open the refrigerator; a couple of days without power and the contents will be ripe. He fires up the grill and they find and heat a can of baked beans. There’s a sack of potatoes and a sack of onions. He dices them up and fries them in oil in a frying pan. He’s not a great cook, some of the potatoes get burned. They eat sitting on the deck and dessert is from the stash from the vending machine. He really can only bring himself to eat the beans. He skips the potatoes and the dessert.

            He finds himself wishing for a beer or a drink. He thinks about looking for alcohol in the house but he wonders if drinking makes him crazy and rage filled, if drinking lets out that other Sam. He doesn’t want to risk it.

            Brenna doesn’t want to sleep in someone’s bed so he finds the linen closet and pulls out sheets smelling of laundry detergent and softener in the darkening house and makes her a place to sleep on the couch.

            He goes to the master bedroom and wraps the hunter green comforter around himself. He lies there a long while looking at the dresser. There are a couple of framed photographs of girls on it—high school graduation photos and a wedding photo: big foofy white dress and stiff, happy bridegroom in a tux standing outdoors in a park. A jewelry box, a bottle of lotion, a box of bank checks. There’s a little dog bed with a blue plaid lining and pale tan dog hairs.

            He doesn’t imagine the family. He doesn’t try to imagine anything. He can feel the bone deep tiredness and one of his shoulders aches. He wills himself to relax. He tries to empty his mind.

            He thinks about Latin. _meminisse._

            Present indicative, active: _meminī, meministī, meminit, meminimus, meministis, meminērunt,_ Indicative imperfect: _memineram, meminerās, meminerat, meminerāmus, meminerātis, meminerant._ He soothes himself with the mental murmur of conjugation. Nominatives, subjunctives, possessives. He drifts.

            _It is the place with the great one where time and space shift unknowably. Sometimes there are two but the attention of one is always there. The attention is like love but so much vaster. Like hate, but so much more. What he feels for the morningstar isn’t something that he can explain but words like awe and terror are attempts at it._

_A door opens in the space and it is astonishingly mundane. A door. Human sized._

_The man in the dark suit steps through. Looks up and around and raises an eyebrow._

_“This is what you remember?” he asks._

_What’s there to say?_

_“Well, I guess there’s a little bit of the feeling. Come on, Moose.” The man gestures towards the door._

_He can’t move, not here. He can’t do anything here._

_“Oh bloody—” The man in the suit produces a very large black umbrella, opens it with a snap and once he can no longer feel the regard of the morningstar, he can walk through the door into a sitting room with a couch, red walls, and black lacquer furniture. There is black and white wallpaper on one of the walls and the pattern won’t stop moving. He’s afraid to look too closely because he’s pretty sure the pattern is actually insects._

_It is marginally less disturbing than the previous room._

_“Where are you?” the man asks._

_“In bed,” he answers honestly._

_The man crosses his arms. “Cute. You don’t happen to know where my mother is, do you?”_

_He shakes his head although it’s an interesting question. “Has she lost her memory?”_

_“We should be so lucky,” the man says. “Have you got yours back?”_

_He shakes his head. “No, but I looked myself up on line.”_

_“Did you find those trashy novels?”_

_Novels? “No, I found the video.”_

_The man in the suit frowns. “Video?”_

_“From the shooting in the diner.”_

_It takes a moment and then the man lights up. “Ah, the shooting in the diner._

_The Winchester greatest hits. I love when you get that expression, Moose. You get that wrinkly thing going between your eyebrows.”_

_“Who are you?”_

_“I’m the King of Hell.”_

_He thinks that may be literal._

_“Sam,” the King of Hell says, “you gave my mother a very important book. Your brother needs to get it back for me and you need to give me the code to break it. You’ve got the code on your phone. The book might be able to help us with this thing you and Dean have unleashed.”_

_“Is your mother the Queen of Hell?”_

_“Rowena is a hag-ridden bitch and when I get hold of her I am going to strangle her with her own intestines, or maybe Castiel’s.”_

_“The internet said I was dead,” he says._

_The King of Hell smiles and his eyes turn red. “You’re not dead right now, Sam. You’ve helped let The Darkness lose in the world. I can help you clean it up. Help me find_ The Book of the Damned _. I’ve got some of my people looking for you.”_

_He is pretty sure that helping the King of Hell is not going to make the world a better place. But he finds it easy to believe that something might be his fault._

_Way too easy._

 

            He wakes up cold. He goes to find more blankets. Brenna is curled up in the chilly living room so he covers her with more blankets and then goes back to bed himself. He’s really tired of talking to people in his dreams.

 

            In the morning he makes more potatoes on the grill. It’s sunny and cool, the kind of morning that calls for coffee and eggs and bacon. He really wants to open the refrigerator to see if there are eggs because eggs can go a day or two without refrigeration but he can’t bring himself to risk it. Nothing stinks worse than food rotting in a fridge.

            Brenna is grumpy. “You smell,” she says.

            He does. So does she. Too many days in the same clothes, no showers, do the math. “You can see if you can find a clean t-shirt or something.”

            “Steal someone else’s clothes?”

            He shrugs. He’ll check but he suspects nothing here will fit him. He brushed his teeth with bottled water, sponge-bathed a bit. He itches everywhere. He hates being dirty like this but there is not much to do about it. “I’ll get you to FEMA today. They’ll get you straightened out.”

            “How are you going to do that?” she asks.

            “The truck,” he says.

            “You’re going to steal the truck?” she asks. She’s appalled.

            He smiles. “Yep.”

            “You can’t do that!” she says. “Jeez, Sam!”

            “It’s insured,” he says. “You need to get back with your parents. And you need a shower which is kind of an emergency, at least for anyone around you.”

            “You can’t just steal someone’s truck! I’m not kidding!”

            He shrugs and puts potatoes on a plate. They aren’t burned this morning. He’s getting better at cooking. He really would prefer eggs. A lot of protein and very low carb. “Want some hot sauce?” he asks.

            The potatoes smell good. There’s something else in the air, something faint. He thinks he hears a car motor.

            “Stay here,” he says.

            He’s left the slider open and he walks to the front window, looks outside. A car is idling up the driveway. He thinks of his dream last night. The King of Hell. He runs to the back, “Brenna,” he hisses and grabs her arm. He pulls her and she spills potatoes.

            “Sam! What the fuck!”

            He yanks her and pulls her with him into the garage. It’s empty of cars. Whoever lived here took their car and left the truck when they left. He looks for something to use as a weapon; there are probably guns in the house or the barn and he has his pistol. There are pruning sheers and hedge clippers.

            “They’re coming,” he says.

            “Who,” she says.

            He pulls his gun, still looking around.

            “Sam?” she says, her voice small.

            “It’s okay, Brenna,” he says. Although it’s not. A gun won’t stop them.

            There’s a couple of cans of Krylon™ spray paint. Why is that important? He closes his eyes. The King of Hell. Hell. Damned. Dante. Demons. Exorcisms. Devils. Pentagrams. Devils Traps. He can see it. He knows it. He grabs the paint. He starts to paint on the floor by the door but then thinks, no ceiling is better, morons never look up. Thank God he’s tall.

            “What are you doing?” Brenna whispers.

            Don’t hurry. “Brenna,” he says as he sprays. “This is not about you. When someone comes through the door, just stay down and quiet, no matter what you see, and if you can run, run for the barn.”

            “Who’s coming,” she whispers.

            He hears them on the deck, hears their footsteps. The devil’s trap just paints itself. He thinks he has painted a lot of these. It’s just about six feet across, right beyond the door leading from the kitchen into the garage. He needs them to come into the garage from the kitchen. If they come into the garage from the back yard, he can’t protect Brenna. But he can’t hurry. Everything has to be perfect with the devil’s trap. He can’t hear them searching the house. Search the basement, he thinks.  

            And he finishes.

            He opens the kitchen door to lure them. “Hey—”

            A middle-aged Latino with a crew cut is standing right at the door. He grabs Sam by the throat and lifts him off his feet. “Sam Winchester,” says the man. He blinks and his eyes are black.


	4. Devil's Trap

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Crowley talks past him. “Rowena has The Book of the Damned. It might be able to help against The Darkness. The angels are too weak to defeat it on their own.”
> 
> “You want us to get it back.”
> 
> “I want you to get it back. Then I’ll give you back Sam.”
> 
> Dean can’t breath. He wants to fling himself at Crowley. He wants to throw himself at the trunk of the car, find an angel sword, gank the mother.
> 
> “Castiel told him his name and he looked up ‘Sam Winchester’ on the internet. You know what he found, Dean? The video of the leviathans killing everyone in the diner. Sam thinks he’s a serial killer. He thinks he killed all those people.”
> 
> Dean launches himself at Crowley but of course the King of Hell is gone and he skids across the asphalt, spilling coffee and scraping the heels of his hands.

 

 

 

           Dean wakes up in the Impala. He loves the Impala but not as a motel. The problem is that in the disaster zone, most businesses are closed and any working hotels and motels are filled with disaster workers and relatives looking for the missing.

            He wants a bed. Coffee. Coffee first. He cruised back roads all afternoon and evening yesterday looking for Sam. The problem is that if Sam doesn’t want to be found…

            He wonders if maybe he should go back to the Bunker and use some African dream root and go talk to Sam himself. Walk through Sam’s dreams. It seems like such an invasion of Sam’s privacy and after Gadreel he’s pretty sure he’s the last person who has a right to go stomping around Sam’s head. Maybe a location spell. Sam usually does the spell stuff.

            “Dean Winchester.” There is the smell of sulfur in the air.

            “You know,” Dean says, “you don’t sound Scottish. Willy from the Simpsons sounds Scottish.” He turns around from where he is standing at the edge of the blacktop.

            Crowley is standing in the road, hands in his pockets. Smirking. Crowley does not look like he slept in the back seat of a car.

            Dean is aware that he doesn’t have much on him in the way of weapons that would work on a demon. He’s got the demon blade and an angel sword in the trunk. Crowley could kill him before he has the trunk open. “You’re one of those guys,” Dean says.

            “Enlighten me,” Crowley says.

            “Fake British accent. Expensive booze. A sack of shit in a thousand dollar suit,” Dean says.

            “Are you calling me nouveau riche?” Crowley’s eyebrows go up but the smirk never moves.

            “Sam would call you that. I just call bullshit,” Dean says.

            “Ah, and you don’t seem to have had much luck tracking down Sam,” Crowley says.

            “I don’t suppose you could manage a cup of coffee?” Dean says.

            A woman in a leopard skin bikini and high heels appears with a large take out cup of coffee. She looks like Betty Page.

            “Black, as I remember,” Crowley says.

            The Betty Page look-alike minces over to Dean and hands him the coffee. Dean sips it. It is very hot and very good. None of that Starbucks crap.

            Then she’s gone as if she’d never been there. That’s the thing with demons and angels. Even if you’re looking at them. They don’t just disappear <blink> like _I Dream of Jeannie_. You’re looking right at them and yet they’re gone and it’s like they were never there in the first place and you can’t remember them disappearing. At least Cas has the sound of wings thing. “Why haven’t you just killed me, Crowley?”

            “Because killing you just means you’ll come back to life and make my _life_ , and I use the term loosely, more complicated than it really is. Look what happened to Death. That’s really making a royal mess, you know.”

            “Good to know,” Dean says.

            “Yes, well, this Darkness thing. Sam has really made a hash of it.”

            “Don’t blame Sam,” Dean says. (Is he blaming Sam? Well, yes. No. Later. Fuck all if Crowley gets to blame Sam, though.)

            “Your brother tried to kill me,” Crowley says and for a moment his eyes go red.

            “Touch him and I’ll kill you,” Dean says through gritted teeth.

            “You are mortal and your luck will run out,” Crowley hisses.

            “Talk to Death about that, and Lucifer, and Michael, and all the Horsemen,” Dean says. He takes a step towards Crowley.

            Crowley doesn’t take a step back but he doesn’t fucking kill Dean either. Dean’s heart is hammering a mile a minute in his chest and he thinks maybe he’s made his point. He sips his coffee. “Good coffee,” he remarks.

            “I want to make a deal,” Crowley says.

            “You can put a crown on his head but he’s still—”

            Crowley talks past him. “Rowena has _The Book of the Damned_. It might be able to help against The Darkness. The angels are too weak to defeat it on their own.”

            “You want us to get it back.”

            “I want you to get it back. Then I’ll give you back Sam.”

            Dean can’t breath. He wants to fling himself at Crowley. He wants to throw himself at the trunk of the car, find an angel sword, gank the mother.

            “Castiel told him his name and he looked up ‘Sam Winchester’ on the internet. You know what he found, Dean? The video of the leviathans killing everyone in the diner. Sam thinks he’s a serial killer. He thinks he killed all those people.”

            Dean launches himself at Crowley but of course the King of Hell is gone and he skids across the asphalt, spilling coffee and scraping the heels of his hands.

#

            Sam hears Brenna scream. The demon is holding his throat and he knows that he only has seconds before he grays out. He swings his legs up like the man is a tree and his arm is a limb, swinging them over so he is hanging off the guy and kicks him in the face. The demon isn’t really hurt by Sam’s kick but he is startled and he loosens his hold and drops Sam. There are three steps down from the kitchen door into the garage and Sam lands on tem on his back, painfully. The demon is reaching for him and he can barely do more than crabwalk-scramble backwards. The demon follows him and he turns and crawls.

            The demon grabs at his ankle.

            Adrenaline is a marvelous substance. Sam is on his hands and knees and then sweeping the demon’s feet out from under him. He doesn’t feel anything except the rhythm of the fight. He can see a second demon over his shoulder and Sam is on his feet, the tiny knife he keeps in his boot already out—not his gun, because he wants to lure them—and he’s dancing backwards one shoulder forward, like he would fight them. The second one raises his hand and Sam feels himself picked up and thrown against the garage door and they both come after him—

            And stop.

            His blood is singing and he bares his teeth at them as they look up and see the Devil’s Trap on the ceiling. “You are so screwed,” he says.

            “We aren’t going to hurt you,” the first one, the Latino guy, says. “The boss just wants to talk to you.”

            “The King of Hell?” he asks.

            “Yeah.”

            “He’s going to pull your intestines out through your sinuses when you show up,” Sam says, “ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ _omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursion infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica. Ergo draco maledicte_ —” The words roll of his tongue. He can barely keep himself from laughing. This is the man in the diner, he thinks distantly. He hates them, hates them so hard he could explode with it.

            When he finishes the words they throw their heads back and vomit black smoke and their bodies collapse. For a moment he can only stand their shaking with emotion.

            Then he hears Brenna breathing, almost a sob. He checks the pulse on each man, they are still alive.

            “Brenna,” he says, trying to keep his voice calm, “are you okay?”

            “Oh God,” she says, her voice small.

            “It’s okay,” he says.

            She has pulled herself into the corner of the garage by the door to the backyard. She’s crouched, her arms clasping her knees. She’s staring at him as if he was a demon. Well, he might as well be. “What?” she whispers.

            “It’s over,” he says. “We have to get these two guys to medical help. We have to get you out of here.”

            “Who are you?” she asks.

            “I won’t let anyone hurt you,” he says. “That’s what matters.”

            He hopes. Please God.

 

            The two men are in the back of the truck. He has laid down sleeping bags. He knows that demons are hard on their vessels and he has no idea what the men have been through. His shoulder is aching from falling on the steps but he tries his best to situate them as comfortably as he can, packing them between bales of hay found in the barn so they can’t slide around too much. The Latino has come to consciousness but he doesn’t seem to speak much English. “ _Esta bueno_ ,” Sam has told him.

            “ _Recuerdo_ ,” the man said. _I remember_.

            Sam gave him some water and for lack of anything better to do, took his hand and said the Our Father in Latin. “ _Pater noster, qui es in caelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum…_ ” His Latin is better than his Spanish. It seems to sooth the man.

            Brenna sits in the passenger seat. She watches him work under the dashboard to pull the starter wires and then strip them.

            “Why are you nice to them?” she asks.

            “It wasn’t them,” he explains. His back hurts where he landed on the steps and then again was thrown into the garage door. He found aspirin in the bathroom, quaintly old-fashioned, he thought. “They were possessed.”

            “’Possessed’ possessed?” she asks. “By the devil possessed?”

            “By some minor league demons possessed.” He puts the wires together and the engine turns over. He does it again, feathering the accelerator and the engine catches. “Okay,” he says. “You can close your door.”

            “What you did, was that magic?”

            “It was an exorcism. It’s a Catholic rite.”

            She closes the passenger side door. “This is crazy.”

            “I know. I’m sorry.” He puts the truck in reverse and backs slowly down the driveway. He thinks he’s driven a truck before. He doesn’t think he’s done it a lot. Mostly cars.

            “What about that thing, the pentagram-thingy you did on the ceiling.”

            “What about it?”

            “Was that magic?”

            “It’s called a Devil’s Trap,” he said. “Is it magic? I guess. But then so is praying. It’s not witchcraft or black magic.”

            “Okay,” she says. “Are you a witch?”

            “No,” he says. Is that true? He doesn’t think he’s a witch. He doesn’t like the idea of being a witch. “You shouldn’t talk about it to other people. You should tell them we found these guys in a house and they were in a bad way.”

            “Why?” she asks.

            “Because if you tell them you saw demons they will send you to therapy or think you’re acting out for attention.” The truck rolls easily onto the highway and he heads back towards the church he left the day before. He smiles. “They’ll think that you’re trying to get the attention of your divorced father.”

            “Sam! This isn’t funny!”

            “No,” he admits. “It’s not.”

            “What you did, that was crazy! How did you know what to do!” she asks.

            “I don’t remember. But they were looking for me so we have to get you far away from me, okay? I’m not a good guy, okay?”

            She looks at him, frowning. Then she looks out the window. They pass early morning fields. Some of them are bare. Some of them have tall grass. He checks the window to check the men in the back. He hates having them in the bed of the truck. He keeps his speed between thirty-five and forty to keep from jarring them too much.

            “That’s not true,” Brenna says all of the sudden. “You were nice to that guy and you prayed with him and tried to make him feel good and you’re nice to me. You could have left me.”

            “You don’t know me,” he says.

            “You don’t know you,” she says. “We can’t remember who we are. But I think you’re pretty good, Sam.”


	5. Ships Crossing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “So maybe he’s just pissed,” Dean says. The thought of Death still around and pissed doesn’t thrill him.
> 
> “It’s possible,” Castiel concedes “Or someone may have to take his place.”
> 
> “I already auditioned for that musical and we saw how that went.”
> 
> Castiel nods. “There is Sam.”
> 
> “No,” Dean says. “There is not Sam.”
> 
> Castiel cocks his head slightly the way he does when he is figuring Dean out.
> 
> “You could do it,” Dean points out.
> 
> Castiel looks startled. Dean tries to remember if he had ever seen the angel startled. Confused, yes. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m not able to adequately execute the duties of an angel.”

 

 

 

 

            The backdrop to the end of the world has always been motel rooms. Or the bunker. Not that most people ever knew that there is a backdrop to the end of the world. Now suddenly the backdrop to the end of the world is Nebraska farmland in the fall, with it’s huge open sky. Dean was born in Kansas and he should probably be more comfortable than he is under that huge expanse of blue but he feels alone, no cover and no brother for back-up. He needs to talk to someone to bounce ideas off of, to think.

            He sucks at being alone.

            “Cas,” Dean says to the air, “Crowley’s got Sam. He says he’ll trade him for _The Book of the Damned_.”

            The trench coat flutters in the breeze. “Dean,” Castiel says. “Last night The Darkness covered parts of Arkansas, Louisiana and east Texas.” The way he stands reminds Dean of the way Cas was when Dean first met him. Cas is a soldier.   Despite the accountant suit and the tie, Castiel has been a warrior longer than man has existed.

            “All those people forget who they are?” Dean said, his mouth suddenly dry. He should have turned on the radio.

            “No,” Castiel says. “They’re asleep. They won’t wake up.”

            “How many,” Dean asks, hoarse.

            “547,253,” Castiel says with angelic precision.

            “Asleep?” That doesn’t sound so bad.

            Over half a million people who won’t wake up. Won’t eat. Won’t drink. IVs. Tube feeding. Diapers. Families. Old people. Children. People like that woman and her picture of a toddler in the gas station. Were people driving and just fell asleep? People in surgery? Dean opens his mouth to ask how many died and just closes it. “How do you fight darkness?” he asks.

            “Not with swords,” Castiel says. “We push. It…it’s hard to explain.”

            Dean waits.

            “Dean, do you remember when I first came to you, before Jimmy Novak offered to be my vessel? In that abandoned gas station?”

            Dean doesn’t understand what Castiel is talking about. It’s pretty hard to think about the angel as anything other than the somewhat awkward, intense person/angel. Then he remembers the gas station, the noise, the windows shattering. The sense that something huge and otherworldly was operating on several realities at once and on all those realities it could burn out anything as fragile as a human.

            Really it didn’t pay to think too much about what Cas was when he wasn’t being the guy who didn’t get what the pizza man was doing. As tall as the Chrysler Building.

            Dean reminded himself that he had killed Death and Sam had stopped the Apocalypse and really, the Winchesters were pretty bad ass.

            “Crowley doesn’t want The Darkness any more than the angels, right?” Dean asks.

            “The Darkness is as indifferent to the goals of Hell as it is to Heaven,” Castiel says.

            “Then getting _The Book of the Damned_ might tell us something about the nature of The Darkness.”

            “Everything that _The Book of the Damned_ reveals comes with a cost,” Castiel says. “Using it to battle The Darkness is a mistake.”

            “Yeah. That’s pretty obvious. But we don’t know anything about The Darkness, right? We sure don’t want Crowley or Rowena to have the book. And we’ve got to get Sam back.”

            Castiel considers this. “We don’t want Rowena or Crowley to have the book. We do have to get Sam back. And things are not going right without Death.”

            “Not going right. What does that mean? People aren’t dying anymore? People still get sick without Pestilence. Reapers are still around, they still collect people, right?”

            “People are still dying. But fewer and fewer each day. Death was different than the other Horsemen. The other Horsemen were scourges. Death was a balancer. He was essential. No one knows _what_ exactly what you did means. No one even knows if you even actually killed Death or if that was just a particular incarnation.”

            “So maybe he’s just pissed,” Dean says. The thought of Death still around and pissed doesn’t thrill him.

            “It’s possible,” Castiel concedes “Or someone may have to take his place.”

            “I already auditioned for that musical and we saw how that went.”

            Castiel nods. “There is Sam.”

            “No,” Dean says. “There is not Sam.”

            Castiel cocks his head slightly the way he does when he is figuring Dean out.

            “You could do it,” Dean points out.

            Castiel looks startled. Dean tries to remember if he had ever seen the angel startled. Confused, yes. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m not able to adequately execute the duties of an angel.”

            “You saved the world along with Sam and me,” Dean points out, “and God promoted you.”

            “Death is older than my father,” Castiel says.

            “That’s what Death said. Who knows if he was telling the truth.” Dean dusts his hands off on his jeans. “I’d rather you didn’t because you barely have time for us as it is.” He gets in the Impala and waits to see if Cas will join him. The angel pops into the passenger seat. Dean resists the impulse to say for the thousandth time, ‘Use the door.’ “Can you find Rowena?”

            Dean’s cell rings before Castiel answers. He doesn’t recognize the number. “Hello?”

            “Hi, um, this is Twelve? The guy at the shelter? I just wanted you to know that Moose, er, um, your brother is here.”

#

            Sam gets to the shelter where he started the day before and he’s lucky that in the morning there are two FEMA volunteers with phones working there. He explains that he found Brenna and that they found the two injured men when they stopped at a house.  

            The volunteers call for help. Brenna is fed. There’s commotion.

            “Good to see you, man,” Twelve says. Sam is standing as far back from where everyone is crowded around the FEMA volunteers as possible. Everyone is out in the gravel parking lot, and one of the volunteers, a guy with a ponytail who apparently has some kind of minor medical training, is in the back of the gray pick-up with the two men who were meatsuits. Brenna is inside. They’re going to take her back to the main camp. She’s a juvenile and has at least a first name so she shouldn’t stay here.

Twelve has come to stand beside him.

            He smiles. He’s nervous about trusting other people with Brenna. He feels dirty and itchy around all these clean people. The FEMA volunteers look particularly clean. The Anons are wearing clothes that look haphazard and donated. Twelve has on a t-shirt that says JOHNSON FAMILY REUNION in iron-on letters. The FEMA volunteers look like they actually bought their clothes. Sam is pretty sure he looks borderline street person.

            “Where’d you go?”

            He shrugs. “Just started walking.”

            Twelve nods. “We got some clothes. Salvation Army kind of stuff. Could probably find you some shirts. You should shower.”

            So he does and finds a clean shirt and t-shirt and a hoody that is wide enough in the shoulders and clean boxers. He can’t find any pants long enough so he has to keep his jeans but he feels a lot better.

            He can’t take off in his truck because they haven’t moved the two men out of the back but he’s not comfortable staying. Twelve is staying with him, knows that he wants to leave. “You should stay a bit, Moose. Turns out I probably did work in a restaurant. I’m making lasagna tonight.”

            “I don’t think I can,” he says.

            “Why not?”

            “I’m pretty sure there’s a warrant out for my arrest.”

            “Don’t worry, man,” Twelve says. “No one is going to care about that. Another thing just happened down in Arkansas. Big dark cloud settled in and now they say half a million people won’t wake up. They’re sleeping. The authorities got so much on their plate that they aren’t going to care if you’re Osama bin Laden.” He’s not telling something.

            Someone was here looking for him, Sam knows it. Demons, he suspects.

            “Osama bin Laden is dead,” he says, smiling.

            “How do you know there’s a warrant out there, you don’t even know who you are.”

            He doesn’t say anything.

            “Look, your brother was here. You got family.”

            His brother who has been declared dead twice. His brother who is in the video with him killing all those people. When he watched that video he’d felt no connection to either of those men. Couldn’t even remember what the brother had done in that video. What he could remember was the other video, the hostage at the bank, the brother letting the hostage go and that face caught for just a moment. Something twists in him so painful. He doesn’t know what to make of it. Is it love? Hate?

            Will being with his brother turn him into that other Sam?

            He needs a car. He thinks he needs to get out of this area, the amnesia zone. Get to a city. A city will require cash, of course. An ID. Office Max, he thinks. Laminating. He pictures a printer. He needs a library. A computer, a thumb drive. There’s a kind of paper he can use that will make a passable ID. Won’t stand up to very much scrutiny but it will do until he can get the resources he needs to get a good one.

            He’s done this before.

            “I’m going to see if there’s a couple of more t-shirts I can wear,” he tells Twelve. “Then I’m thinking a nap.”

            “Cool,” Twelve says. “That’s cool.”

            He ducks into the building, into the dim hallway, out of the autumn sunlight. There’s a canvas duffle bag. On anyone else it would hang to their knees but he’s a big guy so it just hits his hip. He puts a couple of shirts and a blanket in it. He steals into the kitchen and collects a half dozen bottles of water. There are granola bars. He finds two big butcher knives. He wavers, thinks of Twelve making lasagna. Butcher knives are lousy weapons, what he really wants is a machete.

            (A machete? Some part of him thinks. Who wants a machete? The guy in the video. That guy probably loves machetes. He needs to get away from these people.)

            He wishes he could say good-bye to Brenna.


	6. People From Hell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The big guy has motorcycle tats. The smaller guy, the one who had been in the bathroom, is a neatly built black guy with a shaved head. They both blink black and then normal. The black guy puts his hands up. “We just want to talk.”
> 
> “I hear people in hell want ice cream, too.”
> 
> “You’re looking for your brother.”
> 
> Dean feels the temptation to show them how he feels about that. “Crowley lied to me about Sam.”
> 
> “He had some bad information,” the demon says. “We just want to help you find him.”
> 
> “You tell Crowley to stay away from me and my brother,” Dean says. He twirls the demon blade and takes a step towards the two demons. “Now, you want to stay topside?”

 

 

 

            As soon as Dean tells Castiel that Sam is at the shelter, Cas touches his shoulder and there is that all too disturbing feeling and they are in back of the church. Then Cas is gone. Then back. “He’s not here,” Castiel says.

            “Fuck!” Dean says. He walks around to the front of the church. There are a couple of people in the parking lot but none of them are Twelve. He keeps his hand on the demon knife and goes inside. Crowley is on the prowl. Anyone could be a demon. Twelve might be possessed. He doesn’t know why Crowley would want him here but it’s hard to tell with Crowley these days.

            He finds Twelve in the kitchen wearing a hairnet and an apron, making potato salad. Twelve wipes his hand on the apron. “Hi.” Twelve looks at Castiel. “What are you, the IRS?”

            “Thanks for calling,” Dean says. “This is Cas. He’s a friend.”

            “Yeah, I borrowed a phone from Mandy. She’s a FEMA volunteer. Moose took off,” Twelve says. “I’m sorry. Did you see those other guys?”

            “What other guys?” Dean says.

            “They said they knew you.”

            Cas and Dean look at each other. Cas takes two steps out into the hallway, out of Twelve’s sight, and is gone.

            Travis leans a hand on the counter, “I don’t get it man. If I had a place to go to…”

            Castiel appears in the kitchen and says, “Demons.”

            Twelve’s eyes get very big. “What the fuck!”

            “Come on, Cas!” Dean says. “You can’t just do that to civilians.”

            “They are coming this way,” Cas says. He turns and does that twisty thing he does with his hand and his angel blade appears like it was in his sleeve or something. Dean takes out the demon knife.

            Twelve starts backing away, hands up. “Look, I don’t know what this is about—”

            A man and a woman stop in the door. Their eyes are black.

            “Tell Crowley to stay away from my brother,” Dean says.

            The woman smiles. “When you leave we’re just going to come back and take someone else’s body.” She’s in her thirties.

            Twelve says, “Carla?”

            ““It’s not Carla,” Dean says.

            “Maybe we’ll take this guy,” she says. She throws her head back and black smoke erupts out of her mouth. It pours, out and across the ceiling and Twelve’s head snaps back and it pours into him.

            Cas starts to put his hand out to take Twelve down and he’s got his soldier face on—

            “Cas!” Dean says, “No!” He doesn’t want to kill the guy. Wasn’t his fault he was nice to Sam. Dean pulls out his phone.

            “You can’t be protecting people here and finding Sam,” the demon in Twelve says.

            Dean starts the recording of Sam doing the exorcism. Sam’s voice is almost like Sam in the room. “ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ _omnis satanica potestas…”_

            The demon walks towards Dean. The other demon in the doorway is grinning, eyes still black. It’s like a game of hot pocket with Castiel and Dean in the middle between the demons.

            Dean says, “Stop.”

            “You don’t want to this guy,” the demon says.

            “I will to send you back to hell,” Dean says and lunges with the knife out.

            The demon leaps back and throws his head back and vomits black smoke. Twelve collapses.

            Castiel takes a step towards the other demon but it is also exiting its host. Sam’s voice is still exorcising but the whole thing is over before the rite is finished.

            Twelve levers himself up on his elbows. “Jesus Fucking Christ,” he says.

Please do not blaspheme,” Castiel says.

 

            “He told me he was going to take a nap but then he just, I dunno, disappeared.” Twelve is genuinely apologetic, like watching Sam was his job. “I tried to keep him, man. I really did.” He’s sitting on a folding chair holding a cup of coffee. He has his shirt off and Dean is using a sharpie to draw a protection tattoo on his chest. To Castiel Twelve says, “You’re really an angel?”

            Yeah,” Dean says, “Angels aren’t exactly what you think. Cas is one of the good guys, though. Do you know which way Sam went?”

            Twelve shakes his head. “No idea.”

            “Why’d he came back?”

            “He brought a couple of guys who’d been injured and a teenaged girl who’d been stranded.”

            “That is something Sam would do,” Cas says.

            Right. Of course. “Are they here?” Dean asks.

            “The guys were in bad shape. They took them to a medical facility. But the girl is here waiting for a pick-up.” Twelve looks past him and gets an odd look on his face.

            “Where do I find her?” Dean asks.

            “I think she’s in Room D. Are Carla and Rooster gonna be okay?”

            “They were not possessed for very long,” Castiel says. “There’s been very little damage to their bodies.”

            “You may have some explaining to do.”

            The girl is easy to spot. She’s sitting on a camp bed paging through a coloring book she really doesn’t care about. She’s a kid with teal streaks in her hair. Not the cute cheerleader type, the in the drama club type. She has the look of someone who isn’t exactly here but hasn’t anything to do but kill time. The airport look. The bus station look. The room looks like it might have been used for Sunday school or something at one point but now it’s filled with rows of camp beds. There are a couple of women at the other end of the room, talking to each other. They glance up when Dean and Castiel come in but go back to talking.

            “Hi,” Dean says and smiles at the girl.

            She looks up, hopeful. “Hi?” she says.

            “I’m Dean. I think you might have met my brother, Sam?”

            She looks at Dean and then at Castiel. She whispers, “Christo.”

            Dean takes a deep breath. “I’m not a demon.” He sits on the camp bed next to her so he’s not looming over her. “That’s Cas. He’s a friend of Sam and me. Are you okay?”

            She nods.

            “Is Sam okay?”

            She breathes out, “Yeah…”

            He breathes out too. “He taught you that, to say ‘Christo,’ right? Did demons come after you?”

            She nods and her eyes start to well up. She’s so young to be on her own.

            “Hey, hey, hey,” he says. “It’s okay.”

            “Sam stopped them,” she says. “He painted a devil’s trap on the ceiling of the garage. Then he helped the guys that they’d been inside.”

            Castiel says, “The two men you brought back had been possessed.”

            “Then he hotwired a truck and brought us here,” she says, looking up at Castiel. She looks back at Dean. “Then he snuck off. He said he isn’t a good guy.”

            Dean looks up at Cas.

            Cas does not have the sense to look guilty. “Sam works very hard to be a good man,” Castiel says.

            “Sam is a good man,” Dean snaps at Cas. “What’s your name?” he says to the girl.

            “Brenna,” she says. “I told him he was wrong. I’m starting to think he might be on a kind of guilt trip.”

            Dean laughs. “You have no idea. Sam is kind of the president of the club when it comes to guilt trips.”

            She grins at him.

            “You don’t have any idea where he went?” he asks.

            “I’m pretty sure he went that way.” She points east.

            “How come?” Dean asks.

            “Because he’s looking for a car to steal and we came from that way,” she points west, “and there isn’t anything but fields for miles.” Smart girl.

            “Brenna,” Dean says, “Cas is going to come back and bring you something. It’s called a hex bag. As long as you are carrying it, no demon can find you. The demons don’t want you, they want Sam. But I know it will make you feel safer.”

            “Why do they want Sam?” she asks.

            “It’s complicated,” Dean says.

            “He’s kind of a badass,” she says.

            “He is very much a badass,” Castiel says. His delivery of the word ‘badass’ is pure Cas.

            Brenna looks up at Castiel, trying to figure him out.

            Dean shrugs. “Don’t worry, he’s always like that.”

            She grins again.

 

            If Sam has a car, he could be anywhere. Dean thinks about what Sam would do. At first he thinks about what Sam would do if he didn’t want anyone, including Dean, to track him. Then he realizes that Sam is running on sheer instinct. He’s not trying to dodge Dean. He has no idea what Dean would do because he can’t remember.

            Cas can fix that. Sam’s not hurt. He’s not dead. He just doesn’t remember Dean. Like that isn’t a kick in the nuts.

            “He’s going to either stay in the disaster area or head for a place where he can establish ID,” Dean says out loud. He’s talking to the car because Castiel is gone again and Sam doesn’t remember him so he’s by himself and really, he thinks better if he talks to someone. “He’s tired of the FEMA fuckwads and demons found him in the disaster zone so he’ll head for a town or a city. That means he’s got to get east of Lincoln.

            What’s east of Lincoln?

            The best thing to do is drive and think like Sam.

            He drives.

            Lincoln is full of those programmable road signs that usually say things like _road construction expect delays_ and now give directions for people to register for information on relatives, register if they have no memory, find food and shelter. Dean drives through Lincoln. He gets on a highway, traveling east, looking for a place he thinks Sam would stop.

            Sam needs cash. Sam hates to steal. Sam can hustle pool if he has to. He’ll work if he can find someone to pay him under the table. As soon as he can find an office supply place he’ll make an ID. Then he’ll find some kind of job. He’s bused tables, done maintenance in a hotel, so it will be a nothing job.

            Eventually someone will need help. Someone will be haunted. Sam will step up. Or Crowley’s demons will find him.

            Dean drives out of the disaster zone and starts watching for a car pulled over or a bar with a pool table. Whatever car Sam stole, he can only go as far as however much gas it has.

            “Come on, Sammy,” Dean says. “Are you sleeping in a car?” He sees a roadhouse and pulls off into the parking lot. He pulls out his picture of Sam and tucks it in his pocket. He gets out of the Impala and stretches and hopes this place has good burgers. Looks around the parking lot at the cars. Sam always steals beaters. He checks them all before going inside.

 

            The place has a pool table but no Sam. The burger is thin and dry. The onion rings are greasy in a bad way. He hits the head before he leaves and as he is zipping up, he catches the faint whiff of sulfur. He doesn’t give any indication, but when he walks out, a big guy just happens to be waiting at the end of the hall to the bar so he turns left and goes out the back. He hears two sets of footsteps behind him. The sun has just set.

            He steps under the light out back and pulls the demon blade. He is getting so tired of this. The dumpster smell is strong. “I’ll punch your ticket back to hell,” he says pleasantly.

            The big guy has motorcycle tats. The smaller guy, the one who had been in the bathroom, is a neatly built black guy with a shaved head. They both blink black and then normal. The black guy puts his hands up. “We just want to talk.”

            “I hear people in hell want ice cream, too.”

            “You’re looking for your brother.”

            Dean feels the temptation to show them how he feels about that. “Crowley lied to me about Sam.”

            “He had some bad information,” the demon says. “We just want to help you find him.”

            “You tell Crowley to stay away from me and my brother,” Dean says. He twirls the demon blade and takes a step towards the two demons. “Now, you want to stay topside?”

            “Look, we can help—”

            “ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ _omnis satanica potestas—”_

The demons retreat back into the bar.

            Dean is a little disappointed. He’s full of frustration and anger.

 

            For the first time in several nights he checks into a hotel in Creston, Omaha. He books a double room without thinking and when he opens the door, the second bed is a punch. He showers and falls into one of the beds. The other bed is so silent, so empty. He closes his eyes and he can feel Sam’s absence. The empty air.

            He is beginning to think it will take awhile to find Sam. Maybe weeks. Maybe longer. Crowley has an army of demons out there looking. He has only his knowledge of his brother.

            Where is Sam sleeping tonight?

            He should get some African root and try to stalk Sam in his dreams. Try to talk to him. When Cas comes back the next time, he’ll ask him to help. Cas has fucked things up because he doesn’t know how to talk to Sam. Dean knows.

            Is Crowley talking to Sam now? What if Sam has hitchhiked? What if Sam is five hundred miles away and Dean’s plan to check all the bars in the next 150 miles is pointless? He’s counting on knowing Sam’s habits to help him but there are so many ways that his brother could have done something unexpected. Maybe he should go back to the bunker and look up a location spell. He’s not incompetent at spells.

            What if Sam is in an accident? So many things could happen.

            Dean is so tired.

            He can feel himself losing direction. Losing purpose. Taking care of family, saving people, hunting, doing things. It’s how he deals. It’s how he lives. If he can’t he doesn’t know how to be. He’s like a man on a tightrope who doesn’t dare look down, who has to have a point of focus. He needs to find his brother.

#

            He finds food in dumpsters behind grocery stores and restaurants. He buys a pair of sweatpants from the salvation army and does laundry, finally able to wash his jeans. After three days, he stands with a group of Mexican and Guatemalan guys outside of Home Depot. He gets a job moving furniture and makes fifty dollars but he suspects that he took the job away from someone who needs it. But it allows him to make ID. He knows how to make ID. He knows what kind of paper to pick up at Office Max. He goes to a library and uses a computer. He tries a number of search terms following a faint trail of strange associations in his mind and finds himself on an odd website on the darknet where people who call themselves Hunters hang out. He doesn’t post. He copies files to properly fake the ID onto a thumb drive.

            He gets passport photos at a drugstore. He assembles the thing and laminates it and it’s good enough for a driver’s license from Idaho. He knows it will do.

            He’s Sam Campbell.

            It uses up a big chunk of his money. He spends more on a very cheap bottle of vodka. He finds a side street and parks his car and eats expired apple Danish for dinner washed down with some of the vodka and falls asleep in the back of the junker he has stolen. (He will have to abandon it tomorrow, he’s had it for a day.)

            He is cramped because he’s too tall but the vodka has loosened the feeling in his chest, the insistent loneliness that grows worse each day. His heart, he thinks, is arthritic.

            He dozes…and slips into sleep.

_“Moose.”_

_He’s in a house and there’s a kitchen but it’s so dark in the kitchen that he can’t see in it. His mother is supposed to be cooking in the kitchen but even though he can hear perfectly normal sounds of bacon frying there is something terrible about the kitchen._

_“Sam,” the King of Hell says. He is sitting on the couch in the family room. “You have dreary dreams.”_

_“Why do you keep coming to my dreams,” he asks._

_“I told you. It’s the only way to talk to you.” The King of Hell stirs his coffee. “I mean I tried to send someone to arrange for us to meet when you were awake and you were less than welcoming.”_

_The thing humming in the kitchen is truly terrifying. He isn’t sure what it is. He knows his mother is dead but he doesn’t think it’s his mother. There are things in the dark._

_“Helloooo,” the King of Hell says. “Can you stop worrying about whatever your tortured subconscious is vomiting up and pay a little attention?”_

_“You had a little door you took us through the last time,” Sam points out._

_The King of Hell sighs. He gets up and opens the sliding glass door and they go out on the deck. The back yard is a cemetery, the grass is seer. “Really?” the King of Hell says. “Stull?” He rolls his eyes. “Well, it’s appropriate. You need to help me convince your brother to help me find_ The Book of the Damned _so we can stop The Darkness.”_

_He thinks it is hard to take that statement seriously. It’s like bad horror movie dialogue._

_“I’m not kidding, Sam,” the King of Hell says. “The angels are talking to me. They can’t stop The Darkness like they did the first time. They’re locked out of heaven and nearly powerless. God is off somewhere playing skeeball. They are talking about releasing Lucifer and Michael from The Cage to help.”_

_He listens without understanding. He knows Lucifer is the devil._

_“The angels will release them if you can’t help me stop The Darkness. Lucifer knows you. Sam, remember this. Remember the Morningstar.”_

_The King of Hell opens the sliding glass door and gestures for him to come back inside. He steps through and he is in that place with the terrible power only now he realizes there are two of them. But one of them he knows. He knows so well, so intimately. It is great, huge, and it sears him to be in its presence but he cannot die because he is already dead/not dead and it knows him and he is reduced to blindness, reality shattered over and over—”_

            He shudders awake in the backseat of an ancient Honda Accord, eyes blank, mouth open, and shakes.

            It is over an hour before he comes back to himself. Before his mind begins to work enough that if he needed to he could speak and understand. He doesn’t remember how he knows about what the King of Hell has shown him but it is something he knows. It is something real.

            He cannot bear the thought of those two terrible powers released.


	7. Dancing With Demons

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dean shoves his shoulder against the door and spills into the church. It’s bare. The alter is gone. He’d bet it’s unconsecrated. Sam is there on one side of a Devil’s Trap and Dean feels something in him open up because Sam is facing two demons and he’s got his teeth bared and everything says he’s fine. He’s FINE. Sam throws holy water and it arcs across the face of one of the demons and while the demon is temporarily blinded and screaming Sam leaps forward, grabs the demon’s shirt and slings him into the Devil’s Trap. Sam is dancing with the devil.
> 
> The other demon jumps back and says, “Dean Winchester!”

 

 

            Dean’s unspooling. Three days of checking bars and showing a photo of Sam from an old fake ID and asking if anyone has seen a really tall guy, maybe playing pool. He explains it’s his brother. That he was in the disaster zone in Nebraska. Sam is not the first person to have wandered out of the zone. People are very sympathetic which makes Dean want to punch someone.

            Dean checks the credit card balance and recognizes that he has to do something. There is a batch of credit cards at the bunker but he doesn’t want to drive all the way to Lawrence and then back so he’s going to have to hustle some pool. He gets breakfast and drinks four cups of coffee and eats most of the bacon while reading the paper. He can’t help looking for signs of strange activity. It’s too much of a habit.

            The paper tells of the darkness covering most of Hokkaido, the northernmost of the major islands of Japan. Everyone in the zone over the age of five awoke with the mind of a five year old. Japan is blaming the United States. Dean sips coffee and turns to the local news. He can’t check bars until late afternoon. Maybe the waitress will want to meet him later. She’s cute, looks like she’s got a little bit of Hispanic going on, curvy and big eyes.

            She brings him his check and smiles and lingers a moment and he smiles at her but doesn’t say anything.

            He doesn’t even know how to deal the size of this. He’s so tired. It’s the feeling again that it’s all on him to clean up. To find Sam who brought this thing down on them with that book. Because he got the damn mark in the first place. A twisted history of whose fault is it that he’s finally learning leads nowhere but a room with Death.

            He’s got to stop thinking. He concentrates on the newspaper in front of him. If he could find a simple salt and burn that would be great. What he finds is a freak hailstorm late yesterday afternoon out of blue skies, not ten miles from here. An upswing in petty violence. He needs his brother’s laptop but it’s back in the bunker. He’ll find a library. Which is when he realizes that that’s where he should have been looking for Sam all along. He might be able to figure ways to make money besides hustling pool but he can’t live without computer access, it’s like air.

 

            Dean finds a disturbing pattern. There’s signs of demonic disturbance all around the disaster zone. He starts narrowing the signs: an article about how a rain of spiders could occur. Cattle mutilations. Lightening strikes when there are no storms. All the usual demonic shit. It’s all about a hundred and fifty to two hundred miles out from the FEMA camp where Sam started.

            His first thought is that it has something to do with Sam. Sam has somehow been tainted by the spell that he had Rowena do the way he was tainted by demon blood. Sam is still Sam and if shit is going to hit the fan it is going to end up all over him. But then he thinks about it and he realizes that no, more likely it’s meant to draw Sam because if there’s something else he knows it’s that his brother will find trouble. Dying in a hospital for the mentally ill, Sam found another patient being haunted and did a salt and burn while he was hallucinating Lucifer 24/7 and his fucking fingernails were rotting off.

            It takes him hours to plot out the sites and that means that Crowley has demons everywhere and he’s just one guy. He prints out some articles and a map that he marls with locations.

            He goes out into the library parking lot and it’s evening. Small town suburbia library, a long low building with carefully mown grass and newly planted trees held straight by stakes. The parking lot is black asphalt and mostly S.U.V.s. The Impala looks like a lion among cows. ‘Hey, Cas,’ he thinks. ‘Um, I know you’re busy with this darkness shit but I need you ‘cause Crowley might be closing in on Sam—’

            There is the flutter of wings and Castiel’s hands thump flat against the hood of the Impala. There’s a bit of white light, a slight afterimage of grace and Castiel staggers like he’s punchdrunk. Then he looks up at Dean. “Dean?” he asks.

            “Cas?” Dean says. “Are you…are you all right?”

            Castiel says, “I have been pushing against The Darkness since I last saw you. Have you found Sam?”

            Angels do not sleep or eat. Sometimes it’s hard to understand what that can mean. Dean shakes his head. “No. But I think Crowley’s trying to draw him out.” He shows Castiel what he has found.

            “I’m sorry,” Castiel says. “I don’t know how much I can help. We’ve managed to block The Darkness and when it would have covered Tokyo we could contain the damage to Hokkaido which is much less populated but there are so few of us. Even while I’m here…”

            Dean wants to say, ‘It’s Sam!’ but he can’t. “Gotcha, Cas.”

            “I will try to listen for you and come if I can,” Castiel says and he’s gone.

            “Take care of yourself,” Dean says to the empty air. To one more part of his family who he can’t help.

           

            Dean has narrowed down the likely confrontation with demons to a rural area. Not too many buildings. He’s thinking that means a barn when he calls up google earth at the library. Maybe an abandoned farmhouse. He doesn’t like an abandoned farmhouse—doesn’t like basements or second floors. Too much opportunity for ambush.

            Then he sees an old church and abandoned cemetery and knows just knows that is where they’d be. Demons playing a few of the greatest hits of Dean Winchester’s life; the Trials and Stull Cemetery. Maybe they’d work in a reference to Cold Oak and the hospital where his father died while they were at it. The good news is that it pisses him off. Not Mark of Cain pissed, just normal pissed off which really is dysfunctional enough, right?

            He is blaring Zep while he drives, pumping fury through the music, windows down and cold autumn air pouring in. He shuts it off when he gets about half a mile away. It all feels pretty good, going to gank a couple of demons. Crowley has his search net but Dean has something Crowley doesn’t. He knows Sam. He asks at the library if any of the librarians remembered someone like his brother. “Tall guy,” he said. “Really tall.”

            One of the librarians was pretty sure he did. “Yeah,” he said. “A little hunched?”

            Dean nodded, “Like he thought he was taking up a little too much space?” Cause that’s a total Sam move. Trying to slide through the world without being noticed. What was amazing was not how often he was noticed but how often he wasn’t.

            No surprise when in his headlights, Dean sees an ancient Ford pickup parked at the end of the pair of dirt ruts that lead to the church. The grass is dry and the sun is a bare line of dark violet on the horizon, the sky above him black. He pulls the Impala next to the truck. He glances in and sees the keys have been left on the seat. In case Sam doesn’t come back to it. In case he fucking dies. So it’s easy to return the truck to whoever it was stolen from.

            Goddamn it Sam.

            He grabs an angel sword and the demon blade. Sam has nothing but salt and holy water he can make himself. Devil’s traps. Dean should have gotten here earlier. It’s just that the library computer was slow and Sam is so much better at research. Dean has a five pound bag of salt and a gallon jug of holy water and a can of red spray paint. He runs towards the church. It’s a prairie church, surrounded by weeds. There’s dim light showing out the broken out windows and when he gets close he can hear the sound of movement, of feet.

            “We won’t hurt you,” says a man’s voice, not Sam’s. “Not if you come with us.”

            Dean shoves his shoulder against the door and spills into the church. It’s bare. The alter is gone. He’d bet it’s unconsecrated. Sam is there on one side of a Devil’s Trap and Dean feels something in him open up because Sam is facing two demons and he’s got his teeth bared and everything says he’s fine. He’s FINE. Sam throws holy water and it arcs across the face of one of the demons and while the demon is temporarily blinded and screaming Sam leaps forward, grabs the demon’s shirt and slings him into the Devil’s Trap. Sam is dancing with the devil.

            The other demon jumps back and says, “Dean Winchester!”

            Sam’s concentration breaks for just an instant. He looks at Dean, full stop, not even long enough for Dean to figure out if there’s recognition, and the demon not in the trap waves his hand and throws Sam high and chest first into the wall. Sam hits pretty hard and falls to the floor and there’s blood on the wall. A broken light fixture is stuck out like a spike.

            The demon not in the trap knows he’s screwed up. Crowley wanted Sam. He throws his head back to escape—

            Dean doesn’t wait to see what the damage is. He throws the demon knife. It’s not balanced as a throwing knife but he compensates as best he can and he catches the demon who isn’t in the trap in the throat. He can’t let the guy get away because if he does he’ll bring Crowley. The demon lights up.

            Dean is already on his knees beside Sam who is trying to sit up. The spike caught him just under the rib cage on the right side, like a deep knife wound. Dean holds him down. “Lie still,” he says, “let me look.”

            Sam gasps.

            Blood pumps out of the hole in Sam’s abdomen with every heartbeat. Pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse…

            “The man—” Sam says. He’s looking at the man Dean knifed.

            “You can’t save everyone, Sam.”

            Dean pulls off his shirt and presses it against the wound and Sam bares his teeth again.

            “Can you hold pressure?” Dean asks.

            “Yeah,” Sam says, almost airlessly, and puts his hands on the shirt.

            Dean says to the air, “Cas? Cas if you can come, I’ve found Sam but he’s in bad shape. We’re at a church just north of Jamison, Omaha off H16.” He waits. No flutter of wings. He can’t say he’s surprised. “I’m going to get the car,” Dean says.

            Sam’s eyes are clear, alert.

            “Don’t try to get up,” Dean says. “Okay? Moving is just going to make it worse.”

            Sam swallows. “Okay,” he says. His voice is stronger but still quiet.

            The demon in the Devil’s Trap says, “Let me get my boss. He doesn’t want him to die.”

            “Exorcise him,” Sam says.

            “No time,” Dean says.

             Sam nods. “I can do it.”

             Dean can’t help but look to heaven for patience. “Sam.”

             “The vessel didn’t ask for this,” Sam points out. “It’s okay.”

             “Quit talking, breath quietly,” Dean snaps. ““ _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ _omnis satanica potestas…”_ he stands up. As he does the exorcism, he backs towards the door. Two sets of eyes on him, one set black, the other difficult to determine in the little bit of light from a camping lantern but oh so familiar. When he is finished, he doesn’t even wait to see the belch of black smoke, but turns and heads for the Impala.

             He brings the Impala up through the grass beside the ruts, not trusting them, and parks as close to the door as he can get. Inside, Sam hasn’t move, just lays on his back with one knee up, eyes on the door. In the light Dean can see that the shirt Sam is holding is soaked and Sam’s hands are red. Dean thinks he knows all of Sam’s expressions but this is not one he knows. Sam is patient, waiting. That’s familiar. But there’s no apology, no ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘thank God you’re here’ or even a wordless ‘Dean.’ Not even a sense of pain. Just Sam watching him, waiting because Dean is a stranger. From this angle, his eyes are slightly tilted, fox-like. What if Sam dies without knowing him?

             Dean kneels beside him. “This is going to hurt,” he says. “But I can’t carry you.” Sam is breathing in pants. Dean gets his arm underneath Sam’s shoulders. “Ready?”

             “When you are,” Sam says.

             “Up,” Dean says.

             Sam can’t keep from a strangled sound of pain but he gets his arm around Dean’s shoulders and his legs under him and Dean hauls him up. He does pretty well across the church and out the door but his eyes roll up into his head about the time Dean gets to the passenger door of the Impala and Dean barely gets him in. His head lolls. He’s lost the bloody shirt. Dean grabs it from the grass and presses it against the wound. “Come on, Sam,” Dean says. “Sammy, come on. Look at me. I need you to look at me.”

             After a long, long moment, Sam’s eyes open and he manages to focus on Dean.

             “Do you know who I am?” Dean asks.

             “Brother,” Sam says.

             “You remember me?” Dean asks.

             “No.” He starts taking funny short breaths again from pain. “Dreamed… about you… though.”

             “How do you know I’m your brother?”

             “Internet.”

             “Geek,” Dean says and smiles. “Can you stay conscious?”

             “Yes,” Sam says.

             Dean gets into the driver’s side. “This is going to be bumpy.” He drives slowly back towards the road and it is bumpy. The headlights don’t really show him enough to avoid uneven places. He watches as carefully as he can and listens to his brother gasp when the car lurches and finally they can turn on to the highway. Then he picks up speed until he’s doing seventy on a country highway.

             “We’ll get you to an ER,” he says. “How bad is it?”

             “Bad,” Sam says evenly.

             Which is scary because Sam always lies about how bad it is, always downplays. But then again, Sam doesn’t know him so maybe he doesn’t feel the need to lie.

            “You’ll… call… about the guy… in the barn,” Sam manages.

            “Yeah, when I don’t have to have both hands on the wheel.”

            “Dreamed about… this car.”

            Dean smiles. “You grew up in this car.” He glances over. Sam has his head tilted back against the seat and his eyes closed, the long length of his throat exposed. “Eyes open Sam,” he orders. When he glances again, Sam’s head is still back but he is watching the road. He wants Sam to keep talking. “I talked to Brenna,” he says.

            “How is she?”

            “It was the day you dropped her off at the FEMA camp. She was still waiting for a pickup. She said you had self-esteem issues.”

            Sam doesn’t say anything. No snark. No smile.

            “Talk to me,” Dean says. “Let me know you’re still with me.”

            “Good kid,” Sam says.

            “She seemed like it.”

            “Didn’t want to… hurt her,” Sam says.

            Dean glances over at him again, this time confused. Back to the road. They’re coming up on a bigger highway. His phone says that they’re fifteen minutes from an ER. Sam is still bleeding hard and he’s sweaty.   “What do you mean?”

            “Couldn’t figure out…” Sam stops for a minute. He’s breathing hard from pain.

            “Sam?”

            “What triggers,” he manages.

            “What triggers what?” Dean asks.

            “Crazy stuff… we do.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about, dude. We’re hunters. We go after demons, like the two you went after in the disaster zone and the two you went after tonight. We chase werewolves. Vampires. Do salt and burns to stop ghosts. Shit like that. We don’t do crazy stuff to teen-aged girls.” Unless they’re werewolves or vampires Dean thinks but now is not the time to muddy the waters. He’s on the bigger highway and he’s edging the speedometer up, well over ninety. He swings out around a car and back into his lane, still gently accelerating. The Impala has eight cylinders, she’ll top out at over a hundred, easy.

            He can feel Sam looking at him so he glances over.

            “Video… online. St. Louis… Conner’s Diner,” Sam says. He sounds at the end of his endurance.

            The video of the slaughter of the people in Conner’s Diner by what looks like them using automatic weapons. Oh fuck. Right, Same thinks he’s a serial killer. They did that. “Leviathans, Sammy,” Dean says. “Not us. Not YOU. Not ever you.”

            He glances over and Sam’s eyes are closed. His jaw muscles are twitching and even though he’s in profile Dean knows that he’s got that wrinkly knot between his eyebrows.

            “You remember leviathans?” Dean asks. “Look like humans except when they eat people, then rows of teeth? Borax burns them? Older than angels?”

            “Can’t think,” Sam says. “Sorry. Shock. Shocky.”

            Should have put him in the back seat and elevated his legs. “S’okay. You trust me, right?”

            No answer. Why would Sam trust him? Sam doesn’t remember him.

            “Look at me, Sam.”

            Sam rolls his head towards Dean. He’s loose. He’s on the edge of consciousness. “Can’t… think straight.” He’s still breathing hard. Dean sees his hands have gone lax and he’s not holding the shirt against his side.

            “I know,” Dean says. “Keep pressure on the wound.”

            Sam lifts up the shirt. Dean puts his eyes back on the road.

            “Don’t be scared,” Sam says. Which is terrifying and totally Sam. How can he not remember Dean and still know Dean is afraid?

            Next time Dean looks over, Sam’s eyes aren’t quite closed and all Dean can see is a crescent of white and Sam’s hands are lax again. Dean makes it to the ER in ten minutes.

            He pulls across the diagonal lines in front of the emergency doors and runs to the passenger side door. He yells, “NEED HELP HERE! ANYBODY!” When he opens the door he grabs Sam’s shoulders and half pulls him out. Someone comes to yell at him to move his car but when they see Sam they run back in. He’s supporting Sam’s upper body. The front of the ER is lit hard white. He puts his hand against the wound. Hang on, he’s thinking. Hang on, Sam, I just found you.

            Two guys in scrubs come running with a gurney. He pulls Sam farther out of the car and one of the guys grabs Sam’s legs.

            “On three,” Dean says, “One two THREE,” and they lift his brother onto the gurney. Sam’s head lolls. “He’s got amnesia, from the disaster. Other than that, no allergies, no medical conditions. I’m his brother.”

            They are running. “What happened?” one of the guys asks, a skinny guy with E. Lewstein on his nametag.

            “He was jumped. He got stabbed. He’s in shock. He was talking until a few minutes ago.”

            “Did you bring the knife?”

            Dean shakes his head.

            “Is he on any medications?”

            “No,” Dean says. “He eats a lot of salads and stuff. He’s healthy.” He doesn’t know why he says that. Honestly he should also add that he drinks more than he should but that’s only in the last couple of years. Might as well tell them that he did the trials and was fucked up on a molecular level and that he spent some time in Hell, body and soul.

            “We’ve got him,” E. Lewstein says. “Park your car. Do the paperwork.”

            He stops in the sitting room and watches them take his brother down the hallway. His hands are all bloody. It’s up his arms like gloves and all over his shirt, just from hauling Sam out of the car. Everyone in the waiting room—a woman with two kids, a boyfriend and girlfriend, two middle-aged women, an old man, a family with two kids, lots of people waiting—they’re all staring at him with the blood on his arms and shirt.

            Wash the blood off. Park your car. Do the paperwork.

 

 


	8. The Place You Dream About

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “The place you dream about. You went to Hell,” Dean says.
> 
> Sam tries to think about what Dean means by that. Dean and Castiel are looking at him a bit expectantly, like he should have some reaction. He doesn’t like what effect this conversation is having on his pleasant, pain pill haze. He went to Hell. Given that Castiel is an angel even if he looks like an insurance agent that probably means exactly what it sounds like and there is the dreams. “So I’m not a good guy.” Sam says. No surprise there.
> 
> Dean laughs. “Fuck no, you volunteered to go to Hell to save the world. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’ve done some fucked up things. But martyrdom is kind of your specialty.” He sounds very bitter. “If there’s one thing you live for, it’s the moral high ground.”
> 
> Maybe he doesn’t want his memories back because he sounds like a righteous prick. No wonder he has no friends.

 

 

 

            When Dean’s done all that he goes back. They’ve got Sammy striped of his shirt and he’s still got streaks of blood on his chest. They’ve got IVs and O2 sensor. They’ve got him on a vent mask. They’ve got his legs slightly higher than the rest of him and a woman in navy scrubs is hanging a blood bag next to a bag of Ringers. Sam moves his head slightly to look at the blood bag so he’s conscious again. That’s good. Dean feels something in his chest unlock.

            Dean looks for E. Lewstein but doesn’t see him. The way not to get thrown out of an ER is to not get in the way so Dean finds a chair in another curtained bay—he smiles at the old guy in the hospital gown on the bed in that bay—and pulls it so he’s opposite of the bay where they are working on Sam. They aren’t frantic. Someone says they want to try a little more dopamine because he’s still tachy.

            A woman with a clear facemask and blood all over her scrubs and her latex gloves come over to see him. She raises the facemask. “You’re Sam’s brother?” she asks. The insurance card says ‘Sam Watson.’ He didn’t get a chance to tell Sam that. Her badge says L. Kim, MD. “I’m Dr. Kim.” She’s about 5’7” or so, cute, and way out of his league.

            “I’m Dean Watson,” he says.

            “Your brother is doing well. He’s responsive. We’re giving him IV fluids and blood. We’re prepping him for surgery on the stab wound. You said he was in the zone? That he has amnesia?”

            “Yeah,” Dean says. “He was visiting friends. He was one of those people who wandered away without ID. I just found him.” Dean watches them inject something into the IV. The dopamine maybe?

            “He gave his name as Sam Winchester,” she says.

            Dean looks confused and shrugs. “Beats me,” he says.

            She shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. We’ve had a couple of people from the zone here. I’m pretty sure we’ll end up with some sleepers, too. So you’re an EMT?”

            “No,” Dean says.

            She raises an eyebrow. “The guys who brought him back thought you were.”

            “Must have been confused,” Dean said. “He needs surgery?”

            “Yeah, I’m worried about damage to his intestines. We want to see what else might have been punctured and stop any internal bleeding. I thought you might want to come over and say hello before we take him upstairs.”

            Dean would. Very much.

            “Hey Sammy,” he says.

            Sam opens his eyes and smiles full of dimples.

            “How you feeling?” Dean asks.

            “Morphine,” Sam says. “So awesome.”

            Dean laughs, he can’t help it. “You’re always fun on painkillers. They’re gonna take you up to surgery but I’ll be waiting when you get out, okay?”

            “Go get some sleep,” Sam says. “I’ll be getting good stuff.” He is clearly floaty and high as a kite. He’s still out of it from the blood loss, too. He puts his hand on the railing of the bed.

            “Yeah, I know, but I just found you.” Dean covers Sammy’s hand.

            “Okay,” Sam says. Sam looks at Dean’s hand but it doesn’t seem to bother him.

            “You remember leviathans yet?”

            Sam stops and thinks. It’s clearly foggy in there. Dean looks at his protection tattoo. He glances over and sees Dr. Kim throwing a chest x-ray up and thinks it’s about to get interesting. Enochian symbols all over Sam’s ribs. Well, Sam sure doesn’t know how they got there.

            Sam blinks and then his eyes open a bit. “Oh, right, leviathans.”

            “That’s what the video was.”

            “Not us?” Sam asks.

            “Not us,” Dean says. “We’re the good guys. We save people.”

            “Um, Mr. Watson,” Dr. Kim says, “Can I talk to you?”

            “See you on the other side of anesthesia,” Dean says to Sam. Then he puts on his most innocent expression and turns to Dr. Kim.

#

            The place where they live is a bunker, kind of the best art deco men’s playhouse ever made. Sam doesn’t remember it at all. His room is pretty nice if empty. It doesn’t tell him anything about himself—which is possibly very telling. He likes the library more. Rooms are places to sleep, the library is the place to live. Dean is interesting. Not what Sam would have expected. Dean is loud, and drinks way too much (but Sam can’t really fault him on that score, he can’t drink until he’s off pain meds but he would like to.) He tells terrible jokes. He talks like a sexist asshole and well, like an asshole in general and everything Sam does is wrong. What he eats, what he reads, what he likes to watch on television. All wrong. It should be off-putting but it isn’t.

            Really, since Dean found him he doesn’t know how he feels. They aren’t serial killers. They’re hunters.

            Sam spends a fair bit of time sleeping which was what he was doing when he finds himself sitting up unable to think or move, filled with fear. The King of Hell told him that the angels are going to let them out. He has been dreaming of that, dreaming of the Morningstar. _They are going to let them out._ It’s the middle of the night. His hand hurts and he wants to yank it away from the pain but it’s held, by Dean, who has dug his fingernails into the palm and is saying, “Sam. Sammy. Look at me. Look at me. Stone one, little brother.”

            He can’t talk. He can feel that he’s been sitting with his mouth open because it’s dry. His mind is filled with the Morningstar. The hugeness. The awfulness. Awful. Full of awe. Intimacy and pain. He feels the sense of being shattered and not allowed to die.

He knows he woke up awhile ago. He doesn’t know how long ago. He is locked. But the pain in his hand. The voice. Insistent.

            He manages to look at Dean. He can’t see his face clearly, only his silhouette against the bright light square of the open door.

            Things hurt besides his palm. He is panting. He is trying to say something and for the longest time he can’t until finally he unlocks and says, “They’re going to let them out,” he says.

            “Is it a vision?” Dean asks.

            “A dream. The King of Hell.”

            “Crowley?” Dean is no longer pressing his blunt nails into Sam’s palm. Instead he’s rubbing with his thumb, soothing.

            “Who’s Crowley?” Sam is hoarse.

            “King of Hell. Sounds British. Wears a black suit. Sarcastic.”

            Sam nods.

            “Can I turn on the light?” Dean asks. When he does Sam can see that Dean looks exhausted. Sam has just come home that day and his incision hurts. His insides hurt. “You need a pain pill?” Dean doesn’t wait for an answer.

            Sam wants to say, ‘Wait,’ but Dean is already gone, padding away bare foot on the cold floors. Sam wipes his face. He’s sweating from the pain but he’s cold. But he’s himself.

            Dean comes back with a glass of water. The pain pills are by Sam’s bed and Dean spills two into his palm. “Here big guy. Was it just a dream?”

            Sam shakes his head. The water is good. “I don’t think so. He’s come in dreams before. He says they’re going to let them out. To fight The Darkness. Him and the angels because the angels aren’t strong enough.”

            “Let who out?” Dean asks.

            Sam can’t say it for a minute.

            “Who, Sam? Let who out?”

            Sam grabs Dean’s hands. “I dream about them. The Morningstar and the other one with him.”

            Dean clenches Sam’s hands.

            “I can’t,” Sam whispers and bends over Deans hands. “I can’t I can’t.”

 

            While Sam is recuperating, he is reading the books that Dean says tell the story of their lives. It seems highly unlikely that a bunch of mass market paperbacks with really terrible covers would be remotely true. _Particularly_ given the covers. He’s up to the fifth one which is called _Skin_ and is about a Skinwalker and some people he apparently went to Stanford with. The problem is that when he looks up the crimes described on the internet, he finds out that there really were crimes and that ‘Dean Winchester’ who really does look like Dean was reported as dead. And there’s the journal. Some of the handwriting is apparently their father’s. Some of it is clearly his. Maybe they were all engaged in a shared psychosis.

            Except, of course, those demons.

            Dean is pissed. Pissed as in angry and pissed as in drunk. He is sitting across from Sam at one of the tables in the library with his feet up. Sam can only sit in one of these chairs for an hour or two.

            “Where the fuck is Cas,” Dean says.

            Sam doesn’t know and since he has only met Castiel in his dreams, at least as best he can remember, he doesn’t bother to answer. He’s only been home two days and he has two modes. Mode one is pain pills and mode two is asleep until the pain from having four inches of his small intestine resected wakes him up because he needs another pain pill.

            “You never used to like pain pills,” Dean says.

            Sam nods. “That’s sad,” he says. He’s pretty sincere about that. He feels like most of life is about six feet removed from him and that’s nice.

            “I’ve been thinking,” Dean says and pauses.

            Sam looks at him, attentive. It’s only polite.

            This is apparently another thing that pisses Dean off. “See, that’s exactly the kind of opening you would have jumped on.” He swings his feet off the table and stands up but once he’s standing he doesn’t seem to have any idea where he should go.

            Sam raises an eyebrow, as if to say, in what way?

            “Before you would have jumped all over that. Said, ‘don’t strain yourself,’ or ‘isn’t that above your pay grade,’ or something.”

            “I thought I smelled something burning,” Sam obliges.

            “Bite me,” Dean mutters.

            Sam shrugs. He knows when he’s around Dean he doesn’t feel that deadening loneliness. But other than that, Dean is a stranger. He remembers the man in his dream, the King of Hell, being amused that when he dreamed of Dean he dreamed that Dean was pissed at him. Dean seems pissed at him a lot.

            “I’m sorry,” Sam says and he doesn’t know where that came from.

            “Goddamn, don’t’ start that again,” Dean says and he is truly furious. “We CANNOT start blaming and apologizing. You hear me Sam? This isn’t your fault!” He leans his hands on the library table until his face is only inches from Sam’s face and he repeats it. “This. Isn’t. Your. Fault.” Sam can smell whisky.

            Which makes it pretty clear that it probably is and Sam feels like a stormfront is coming in. “What isn’t my fault?” he asks, trying to keep his voice detached.

            “The Darkness,” Dean says and the moment it is out of his mouth Sam can see that Dean wishes he could take it back.

            “Okay,” Sam says. It seems utterly reasonable that just one guy couldn’t cause a worldwide phenomena that does impossible shit and yet he knows without question that it is utterly his fault. It’s like he had finally put this heavy weight down when Dean told him they weren’t serial killers. Now he picks it up again and it feels like a dull ache.

            “Sam—” Dean says, and stops.

            “You want to tell me about it?” Sam says. He tries to keep his face pleasant, like he doesn’t feel tired and suddenly sad. He doesn’t really want to hear but he can’t not. Go forward.

            “No,” Dean says.

            Sam looks at him. Looks at his face. He feels such a strange mixture of emotions when he lets himself think about that face. Dean usually calls Castiel by saying he is ‘praying’ but by mostly just addressing the air the way he would make a phone call. Sam folds his hands and closes his eyes. “Castiel,” he says, not even sure why he is doing it. “Castiel, if you can hear me, if you can come to the bunker.”

            There is a flutter, like wings. Then the man in the trenchcoat, the man with the incredibly blue eyes, the man who doesn’t blink, is there. “Sam,” he says.

            “Where the fuck have you been,” Dean says.

            “I have been fighting the Darkness,” Castiel says. “Sam, how are you? What happened?”

            “I was fighting a demon,” Sam says. “Dean tracked me down. I was injured but I had surgery and I’ll be all right. Thank you for answering.” Castiel is like he was in Sam’s dreams except even weirder. Like Dean, he clearly knows Sam and like Dean, Sam has no sense of familiarity with him. But he is an angel and he answered Sam’s prayer.

            Castiel reaches for Sam’s forehead with two fingers in kind of boy scout salute and Deans says, “Wait!” Castiel stops. Sam doesn’t know what is going on. “Maybe he doesn’t need his memories back,” Dean says.

            Castiel says to Sam, “Do you want your memory back?”

            “Of course,” Sam says. It’s one way to find out how he managed to cause a world wide catastrophe.

            “NO!” Dean says. “Fuck. Would you just wait? Cas, think about it. Think about all the shit. The Cage.”

            Castiel looks at Sam. “It is true. Many of your memories are bad.”

            “How bad?” Sam asks. The stuff in the books sounds grim. Lousy childhood, fiancé dying but it was years ago.

            Dean said, “Really bad. Psychotically bad.”

            “Dean,” the angel says.

            “Yeah, I know. You took care of that and I’m grateful but if you hadn’t taken down the wall you wouldn’t have had to.” Dean’s look is stony. Sam is kind of glad not to be on the receiving end.

            “Took care of what? Just what are you talking about?” Sam asks. “What is the cage?”

            “The place you dream about. You went to Hell,” Dean says.

            Sam tries to think about what Dean means by that. Dean and Castiel are looking at him a bit expectantly, like he should have some reaction. He doesn’t like what effect this conversation is having on his pleasant, pain pill haze. He went to Hell. Given that Castiel is an angel even if he looks like an insurance agent that probably means exactly what it sounds like and there is the dreams. “So I’m not a good guy.” Sam says. No surprise there.

            Dean laughs. “Fuck no, you volunteered to go to Hell to save the world. I mean, don’t get me wrong, you’ve done some fucked up things. But martyrdom is kind of your specialty.” He sounds very bitter. “If there’s one thing you live for, it’s the moral high ground.”

            Maybe he doesn’t want his memories back because he sounds like a righteous prick. No wonder he has no friends.

            Castiel says, “You went to Hell to lock Lucifer in The Cage and stop the Apocalypse. Your soul spent almost two centuries locked with Lucifer and the Archangel Michael there.”

            The dreams. The King of Hell. “The Morningstar. Lucifer means morning star.” He looks at Castiel. “You’re going to let them out.” In the back of his mind he’s thinking about the two centuries thing. Does that mean he and Dean were born in the 1800’s? Is that any weirder than angels or demons? But mostly he’s thinking about the Morningstar and the idea that they will let him out.

            Castiel says nothing.

            “Tell me you don’t think this is a good idea,” Dean says.

             “The Bible is correct when it says that my Father separated the Light from the Darkness. But it doesn’t describe it as a battle. It took my Father and a host of angels. Now we’re reduced in numbers and my Father is missing.”

            God is missing? He should be more surprised at that then he is.

            “There is no way you’re going to let those fuckers out of The Cage,” Dean says.

            “I need a pain pill,” Sam mutters. He really does. Castiel leans forward and touches Sam’s forehead and everything is infused with this feeling, this energy, the world is light, and there’s a feeling of goodness and health. Sam blinks and the pain is gone.

Which means, sadly, no more pain pills.

            “You didn’t,” Dean says.

            “I did not return his memories,” Castiel says. “I merely healed his injuries.”

            “Did you put back that four inches they took of his small intestine?” Dean asks. “Because that’s just creepy.”

            There is a moment of awkward silence.

            “Sam,” Castiel says, “Do you want your memories back or do you want to wait?”

            “Wait a little while,” Dean says. “A couple of days.” Dean seems…desperate. Not that it’s obvious.

            Why not? “Okay,” he says.

 

            “You’re the genius at research,” Dean says.

            Sam looks around at the books. Also the tables and the beautiful reading lamps. He has no idea where to even start looking for something. Although he likes the idea of all the books. Books, it turns out, make him happy. “Spells?” he says. “Like magic spells?”

            Dean shrugs. “Yeah, I guess. A location spell. To find Rowena.”

            The news is full of a new cloud of Darkness. This one stretches across the Texas panhandle into parts of Arizona and New Mexico. Castiel is gone. Dean says that with this new cloud it’s going to be impossible to get Cas.

            “Rowena is…”

            “Crowley’s mother,” Dean says. “She’s a witch. She has the most powerful book of spells ever made. It’s called _The Book of the Damned_ and it was made by a deranged nun who wrote it in a special code on pages made from her own skin in ink made of her own blood.”

            Sam is pretty sure Dean is making this shit up to see how much he’ll believe.

            “I’m not making this shit up,” Dean says. Which is kind of creepy.

            “Why do we care about Rowena?” Sam asks.

            “Because the book is like, you know, Excalibur or the Holy Grail, except evil, and it might have the equivalent of the atomic bomb for The Darkness.”

            “Right,” Sam says. “Because that sounds like _such_ a good idea.”

            “Sarcasm isn’t really your style, Sam. I’m not saying we use it,” Dean says. “I’m saying we should have the book instead of Rowena or Crowley because nothing about those two makes me think ‘with great power comes great responsibility.”

            “Didn’t you say I caused this?”

            Dean shoves him against a bookcase and suddenly Dean’s nose is about three inches below Sam’s. “No,” Dean hisses, “I did not say you caused this. This. Is. Not. Your. Fault. I got the Mark. The Stynes lost the book. I blamed you for…” Dean stops himself and blows air through his teeth. “Cas helped you. Rowena was part of it. No one knew what the result would be. You were just trying to save me.”

            The books are pressing unevenly into Sam’s back. Dean is clearly working hard to convince himself that this is not Sam’s fault. “Okay,” Sam says.

            They have stirred up a lot of dust.

            “Dean,” Sam says. “If you don’t let me loose I’m going to sneeze in your face.”

#


	9. The Morningstar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sam watches the news about the cloud on the big screen in Dean’s bedroom, sitting in a chair and Dean, sitting on his bed with his legs out stretched, watches Sam. This strange almost not Sam. Sam would normally sit next to him on the bed, it’s a lot more comfortable. But of course, he doesn’t know that and probably thinks it would be weird.
> 
> “Were we born in the 1800’s?” Sam asks out of nowhere. Dean’s expression must be total, ‘wtf man?’ because Sam adds, “I mean, since I spent almost two centuries in Hell.”
> 
> “No, Hell is like parts of New Jersey. It feels like you’re there a lot longer than you really are,” Dean says. “It was only about eighteen months up here.”

 

 

            Dean is not surprised when Sam finds files on his laptop where he had been cataloguing the contents of the Men of Letter’s library and that, combined with their card index, allows him to find some books that might have a location spell. Even without his memory he’s still smart.

            It also keeps him busy, which Dean thinks is a good thing.

            Dean thought Sam would be happier without memories and maybe he is. He’s different. He’s less intense and since most of Sam’s intensity has been focused on either industrial levels of figuring out ways to feel guilty or trying to find solutions to Nobel Prize winning levels of depressing problems that should be a good thing. But the thing that Sam has always been really most intense about is Dean. Everything Dean thinks or does is an open book to Sam. Hiding anything from Sam is like trying to have an affair with Hillary Clinton. (Except, eewww. Jesus, where does he think of these things?) Right now he can hide his feelings from Sam, no problem. Not having to watch Sam watching him drink, not having to watch Sam worry about whether Dean is messed up about the fact that he came this close to lopping Sam’s head off (because Sam would normally totally turn that into something that Dean had to convince Sam that it didn’t really bother him while equally convincing Sam that it did bother him because Sam has to feel like Dean cares without feeling like Sam’s a cause of pain for Dean and FUCK SAMMY I ALMOST CUT YOUR HEAD OFF WOULD YOU JUST GET MAD INSTEAD OF ANGSTING but never mind.) Sam isn’t even concerned about Dean seething about Charlie.

            Should be like he’s been carrying two hundred and twenty pounds and he can finally put it down. That’s what it felt like when he was a demon. Sort of. Or he should be pissed that Sam has fucked up something and is getting off scott free.

            He keeps wanting to see that whorl of wrinkle between Sam’s eyebrows. He was freaked when Sam had the nightmare or whatever the first night in the bunker. He had left Sam’s door cracked and just glanced in and Sam was sitting up in bed and it was clear that all the lights were on and nobody was home. Mouth open. String of drool. Catatonic. Time for the bib and diaper. But in a way that kind of shit, pulling Sammy out of the pit, that was almost normal.

            A lot of times he tells himself it’s because Sam is busy figuring out their life. When he describes it, it does sound like a really cheesy movie sometimes.

            Sam prepares a location spell to locate Rowena which he does pretty much like he always does when he’s doing spellwork. Dean gathered a lot of the ingredients, sure. But Sam’s the guy who is best at pronouncing the stuff. So Sam ground it all up in the big mortar. Sam said the words in Arabic while he did. Sam lights the match—it flares in this basement room of the bunker, the one with the devil’s trap, the one they often use just in case things go south.

            Sam drops the match on the map of the US (a standard school map, blue ocean, states outlined, capital cities and all that crap) and flames start from the edges even though he dropped the match in the center. The flames are brilliant white and blue. This is a different spell than the one they often use. It feels less dark. The flames eat the east coast and race to the Mississippi, are slower from the west, curl down from Canada and up through Texas isolating New Mexico and finally Taos.

            Right.   Which is, at the moment, in the cloud of Darkness.

            “Peachy,” Dean says.

 

            Sam watches the news about the cloud on the big screen in Dean’s bedroom, sitting in a chair and Dean, sitting on his bed with his legs out stretched, watches Sam. This strange almost not Sam. Sam would normally sit next to him on the bed, it’s a lot more comfortable. But of course, he doesn’t know that and probably thinks it would be weird.

            “Were we born in the 1800’s?” Sam asks out of nowhere. Dean’s expression must be total, ‘wtf man?’ because Sam adds, “I mean, since I spent almost two centuries in Hell.”

            “No, Hell is like parts of New Jersey. It feels like you’re there a lot longer than you really are,” Dean says. “It was only about eighteen months up here.”

            “A month equals a decade?” Sam says.

            Dean makes a kind of ‘maybe, maybe not’ gesture. “Yeah. Although it’s hard to say and it depends on what part of it you’re in, I think. Hell is fucked up.”

            “Did you go to Hell, too?”

            “Not when you went,” Dean says. “It was a couple of years before the Apocalypse.”

            “Oh, right,” Sam says, like it clicks in his head. “Cold Oak, Hellhounds.”

            “You read that in the books?” Dean says. Sam says it like ‘Cold Oak’ is an episode of Star Trek or something. Yeah, you know, that book where you died. While I was trying to hold you up in the mud.

            “No, there’s a wiki and I started looking at it but it was too confusing.” Sam frowns. “This needs… an Excel spreadsheet or something.” That is both weirdly Sam and not Sam.

            What would Sam do if he told him that they’re soulmates? That they share a heaven? That Castiel treats them like they’re some kind of rare celestial event, like a blue tiger or Halley’s comet or something? Probably tell him he read it on the wiki.

            Is Sam happier?

            He could always just ask. Except that is not cool. Except Sam doesn’t know that and will apparently tell him anything.

            “Hey,” Dean says, “how do you feel?”

            “Fine,” Sam says, “whatever Castiel did it’s like nothing every happened to me.”

            “No, I mean—”

            “Shh—” Sam cuts him off. He’s staring at the TV. They’re showing the edge of the Darkness. It’s visible, like a curtain of smoke. People are…walking out of it. Sam has hit the unmute. “…first of hundreds of people to come out of the most recent disaster zone,” a newscaster is saying. “We are taking you live to Pima, Arizona to Correspondent Tina Chan.”

            Tina Chan is doing a stand up in nowhere, Arizona—Dean kind of remembers Pima and it is nowhere. She’s cute, holding her microphone. Probably her big moment as a reporter. One minute she’s a pretty girl in Tucson, the next she’s covering this for national news. “Thanks, Stan. 109 people have walked or driven out of that cloud on I70 here in Pima. They say that inside the world is different. Cell phones don’t work, televisions are dead. And inside is a world of darkness, a place where the sun never reaches.”

            They cut to an interview with a woman who looks Native American. She’s got her hair covered in a dirty bandana and has rings of dirt around the neck of her t-shirt. “It’s always dark,” she says. Subtitles identify her as Amber Begay from Three Way, Arizona. “We got in our pickup and drove really slow until we ran out of gas. Then we walked. My dad was in Kuwait and…and there are things in the dark. He shot two of them. We saw people who looked like they’d been torn apart by something. My son is three. If it wasn’t for my dad and my grandpa.” Grandpa is in the background and something says to Dean that Grandpa may have known something about something more than bullets. Dean doesn’t know squat about all the different Native American systems of belief. People think ‘Indians’ and they don’t realize that the Navajo are about as different from the Mohawk as the Italians are from the Russians. Sam doesn’t even try with most of that stuff and Sam can handle Enochian. He says the languages are too hard and the way of looking at the world is too different. But they both respect it.

            Tina the cute reporter comes back and there’s a group of Marines all geared up getting ready to go in. Dean wants to tell them to go talk to Grandpa. They’re just kids going to slaughter. They wouldn’t listen and Grandpa probably wouldn’t talk.

            “We’ve got to check it out,” Dean says. “Rowena is somewhere in the middle of it.”

            Sam looks at him. It’s the same look Sam had when Dean found him with the demons and Sam was hurt, lying on the floor. It’s calm. Watching. Unquestioning. “Okay,” Sam says.

            Why does it feel so strange? Because Sam didn’t know Dean was going to say they should go. He either knows what Dean is going to do or he’s worried about what Dean is going to do, and this Sam is neither. Sam argues. Sam explores the consequences. Sam says they shouldn’t just rush in.

            This Sam looks at him with those slightly up-tilted hazel eyes and Dean doesn’t know what to think.

 

            The drive to the Texas panhandle is going to be all highways through towns like Great Bend, Kansas and Dodge City. It’s the kind of drive that Dean likes and Sammy’s going to be with him. He loves his Bunker but sometimes a guy just needs some gas station nachos and that goopy yellow stuff that they pour on it. He’s eaten so many preservatives he figures he’s preserved into the next century and if he wasn’t going to have a hunter’s funeral they wouldn’t need embalming fluid.

            Sam’s waiting for the laundry to dry. Dean checks the guns and knives. He wonders what kills Darkness monsters. Light maybe? He’s got fire, lanterns, batteries, angel swords, plus silver and iron and salt and borax and all the usual stuff.

            Sam has the duffels packed. Sam has packed his duffel before but it’s always meant he was injured. “I can’t believe you did laundry for me,” Dean says.

            Sam looks at him for a long moment and Dean can see, can fucking see that big brain working. “Okay, next time you’re my bitch,” Sam says.

            “Good try,” Dean says. Sam has clearly clued in that the response to a situation is an insult. Just isn’t quite right.

            Sam shrugs and throws his duffel at him. It hits Dean in the chest, knocks him a half step back.

            “Yeah, that’s pretty much s.o.p., Samantha.”

            Sam grins, “Samantha? Really?” He throws his own duffel in the back seat. “Want me to drive the first leg?”

            “No,” Dean says. “Never. You ride shotgun unless I’m seeing double or bleeding.”

            Sam folds himself into the passenger side. Dean gets in.

            “Uh, you might want your laptop or a book. Unless you want to sleep,” Dean says.

            Sam reaches a long arm back to his duffel, unzips it, pulls out some book. It’s old and in Spanish. He plops it on his lap. “Dean?”

            “Yeah?” Dean starts the Impala.

            “Do you want me to call Castiel?”

            “No.”

            “You don’t think memories will help with this?”

            “Nobody has memories of this but a some douch-bag archangels. And two of them are in Hell,” Dean says. It’s a low blow.

            But it works. Sam doesn’t say anything after that.

#

            He is amazed at the difference in Dean. Dean is a happy guy, driving this big car, playing Metallica cassettes and singing along. “On the road, Sammy!” Dean yells over the music. It’s hard not to grin. Personally he feels a slightly sick feeling in the pit of his stomach. He’s regretting not insisting on calling Castiel to get his memory back. He’s worried about not knowing what’s ahead. He wants to know more. He feels unprepared.

            They stop at a diner and Dean says, “Gotta eat, Sam. Know you hate it.”

            Sam follows Dean into the diner. Does he hate eating? He thinks about it. “Do I hate eating?” he asks.

            “You’re weird,” Dean says. “Eating’s not always your thing. But you also have a thing about being healthy so you figured out this whole system for when food’s not your thing and you need it. You’ve got a notebook about it in the trunk.” They’re standing next to the little sign that says ‘Please Wait To Be Seated’. “You need the notebook?”

            Sam shrugs. The notebook thing sounds crazy.

            “Just a minute,” Dean says to the waitress who has come to seat them. He heads out to the Impala and flips open the trunk. The waitress smiles at Sam. Sam smiles at the waitress. She’s wearing a green polo shirt that says ‘Mar-El’s Diner’ on it. They’re for sale behind the register.

            Dean comes back in and hands Sam a little black spiral notebook. They get a booth which is nice because…because why? Because he realizes he would prefer not having people looking over his shoulder when he’s trying to eat. He flips open the notebook and there’s a lot of info about calories and protein. Workouts. Meal plans for on the road and the bunker. In his handwriting.

            Dean is studying the menu in a way that makes him think that he is really not looking at Sam looking at this utter craziness in his hands. Some of the meal plans are vegetarian and have lots of notations about getting enough calories and protein. It’s kind of OCD. Not kind, really seriously OCD. There is a little note that says ‘Man cannot live on Power Bars alone.’

            “Am I vegetarian?” Sam asks.

            Without looking away from his menu Dean says, “After Hell, sometimes you didn’t like meat. They’ve got a chicken breast thingy on here you’d like. Or a Caesar Salad with chicken or salmon. You eat a shit ton of rabbit food.”

            The waitress shows up at that moment. It’s the same one that seated them. Sam finds he’s dropped the notebook on the seat beside him like it’s porn or something. Dean orders a burger with bacon and Sam orders the salad with chicken. So he’s some kind of anorexic. That’s disturbing.

            Dean is watching him. Sam smiles. He wants to look at the notebook some more and see what else he’s supposed to eat today but he doesn’t. “You think there’s some way we could maybe get a better idea of what we’re heading into?” he asks.

            “Not a lot of research about this,” Dean says. “Sometimes we just gotta go in and hope for the best. Hey! This place has pie!”

 

            They get a motel just over the border in Perrytown, Texas at about 4:30 that afternoon. The motel is three-quarters full, some of it government. Sam can tell from the cars. The news says that the interstates through the cloud are all blocked, as are the major highways. People are told to avoid it. There are clouds on all the major inhabited continents; across parts of Poland and the Ukraine, China and Mongolia, Congo and the Central African Republic, in the interior of Brazil and in Australia. It is amazing how calm people are. There’s very little sensationalism in the news. There is a ton of the usual advice on disaster preparedness (store water and canned goods and batteries) and a lot of coverage on the sleepers and the attempts to deal with them. Nobody even cares much about the amnesiacs. Compared to what’s going on now, amnesia is small potatoes.

            Dean sits on his bed, drinking a beer. Sam sits on his bed, writing notes on his laptop and paging through the black note book. He needs to run and eat a couple of chicken breasts (43 grams of protein in a cup of white meat) and some vegetables and he needs to get back to working out as soon as he can. He didn’t pack running shoes although he remembers he had them back at the bunker. He wonders if he can run in his boots.

            “Do you ever go running?” he asks Dean.

            “You forgot your shoes, Flash.” Dean reaches down beside the bed to a little cooler, opens the top, takes out a beer, and twists off the top. “Lets order pizza.”

            On the other hand, if the Darkness is taking over, maybe he can not worry about eating or exercising. Dean orders pizza and bitches when he doesn’t want more than two pieces. He doesn’t eat the crusts. Dean gives him the stink eye and calls him Mary Kate Olsen. He suspects sometimes he really doesn’t like Dean. The whiplash between caring and hurting is kind of tough to negotiate. He kind of misses his pain pills. He closes his eyes and he vaguely remembers when he first awoke, walking and remembering the Latin names for yarrow ( _achillea millefolium_ ) and wild parsley ( _anthriscus sylvestris_ ).

            He thinks about Latin. Conjugates verbs. _meminisse._

            Present indicative, active: _meminī, meministī, meminit, meminimus, meministis, meminērunt,_ Indicative imperfect: _memineram, meminerās, meminerat, meminerāmus, meminerātis, meminerant._ He soothes himself with the mental murmur of grammar. Nominatives, subjunctives, possessives. He drifts. On television, Jet Li tears through bad guys and there’s the sound of gunfire.

            “Sam,” Dean says. “Sam, look at me. You’re in a motel in Perrytown, Texas.”

            He’s standing barefoot at the door of a dark motel room. “Hmm?” he says.

            “It’s me, Dean. Your brother. You’re sleepwalking.”

            Sam blinks. “Sleepwalking?”

            “Yeah, bro. Get back in bed.”

            “Fuck.”

            “It’s okay. Just go back to bed.” Dean’s voice is steady in the dark.

            “So I’m an anorexic sleepwalker who likes the moral high ground,” Sam says.

            Dean laughs quietly. “Yeah. And I’m an alcoholic asshole with PTSD. You sleepwalk about once every decade. You used to do it a lot more when you were a kid. Go to sleep, Sammy.”

            The room is alight—if light is the right word for it. Sam can see everything in the room clearly and from the way that Dean sits up he’s sure that Dean can too but it’s not exactly seeing. It’s more like ultraviolet, like he shouldn’t be able to see it at all. Pale fire illuminating the two beds, and the dressers, and the window blinds. There’s a tall young blond man in the room dressed in skinny pants and black engineer boots. He looks Russian; pale-eyed and faintly Asiatic, and the light is coming from him.

           “Sam,” he says. A lover’s voice. A terrible voice. A beautiful voice. The room is so cold. Sam knows who it is. Knows him from his dreams. Sam’s back hits the door and his legs give out and he slides down.

           The Morningstar.

           “I missed you,” Lucifer says. “Now that I’m out I’ve come to see you as soon as I could.”

           Dean starts to lunge off of his bed towards the angel and time stops.

           Sam can’t speak. His head is full of the Morningstar. Even though he is here in a vessel, not burning through Sam’s eyes, his ears, his brain, still all that echoes through his nervous system. No one should go to Hell in their own body.

           “They decided that they needed us, Michael and me. I’ll be very busy but I didn’t want you to feel forgotten. My old vessel failed, you know. This is one of Azazel’s next generation but there was never anyone like you. I’d love to be together again. Just say the word, Sam.” He smiles.

           Sam shakes his head. It’s all he can do.

           “It’s the end of the world. We won’t win this time, not without Dad,” the Morningstar says. “I want us to be together.” He steps forward and touches Sam’s cheek.

           Sam shudders in every way.

           He smiles sadly. “If you ever change your mind. No one has ever cared about you in quite the way I do.”

           He is gone and time starts again. Dean lunges off the bed. “Fucker!” Dean yells when he closes on empty air. “CASTIEL! CASTIEL, YOU SON OF A BITCH!”


	10. Driving Into the Dark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is unnatural. A roiling wall of smoke, a cloud of dark fog that should not have been so static but is. It’s like a wall. Unnaturally unmoving but not motionless. Sam sucks the rest of his smoothie through the straw, opens his door and carefully puts it on the pavement. Sam never litters. Dean guesses that in the face of that wall of death and end of the world, littering in the Impala is the lesser sin than just plain littering.

 

 

            They are drinking coffee and Dean is eating breakfast. Sam looks like, well, like his worst nightmare came visiting the night before. Of course, Castiel never came. “You don’t have to go in,” Dean says for the fourth or maybe the sixth time. “Stay here and I’ll pick you up when I come back out.”

            “Sure,” Sam says reasonably. “I’ll just wait in a hotel room for Lucifer to drop by.”

            Dean is going to rip Castiel limb from feathered limb. The good news is that Sam didn’t lie, didn’t hold back information. This Sam doesn’t ‘protect him.’ He told him what Lucifer said, that he asked Sam to be his meatsuit and that there was at least one generation of special kids after Sam’s year. (Sam said vessel, not meatsuit, maybe amnesia means not knowing all the ugly slang.) Dean wonders if having Lucifer in the world means psychic powers for the special kids. Or for Sam. He thinks this is not the time to bring it up.

            “Can you eat _something_ ,” Dean says, irritated.

            “I’ll get some power bars for the road,” Sam says.

            “Goddamn it! You can’t live on power bars!”

            This makes Sam smile.

            “What,” Dean says.

            Sam digs the food notebook out of his pocket, flips it open, slides it to Dean and points to an annotation in Sam’s neat handwriting. ‘Man does not live by power bars alone.’

            Dean doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Fuck,” he says. “I shouldn’t have asked you not to have your memories back.”

            “Why did you?” Sam asks.

            Because I’ve tried to kill you with a hammer and nearly cut your head off with death’s scythe and I really would prefer you don’t remember me as a murdering psycho, Dean thinks. “Cause I thought maybe if you didn’t have some of your memories you might be happier.”

            “Am I?” Sam asks.

            “I don’t know. You’re not exactly Tigger.”

            Sam cracks a smile. “Tigger? Like Winnie the Pooh?”

            “Yeah, Eyeore. How about a smoothie?”

            “It’s a diner, I don’t think they do smoothies.”

            “But you’d do a smoothie, right?” Jess got him to drink smoothies. It’s a fall back.

            “Yeah,” Sam says. “Okay, if they had smoothies, I might drink one. But you can’t really just conjure up one.”

            “Watch me,” Dean says, sliding out of the booth.

            He finds their waitress behind the counter getting a pitcher of sweet tea. “Hey Lindsay,” he says and smiles full on at her. “You know the overly tall guy over there? The one with the mop for hair?”

            “Yeah?” she says.

            “He’s my brother. He’s got amnesia, you know, from the zone?”

            “Oh, man,” she says. “That’s too bad.”

            Dean draws a long face. He reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out his FBI badge and discretely flashes it. “We work together.” Dean shrugs, “Kind of the family business.” He nods his head towards Sam who is watching him with that knot between his eyebrows. “He’s supposed to be on medical leave. There were some things that happened in Nebraska and it was a couple of weeks before he was identified. But with all of the things going on they’ve called everybody who isn’t in a wheelchair or drooling back on duty, know what I mean?” He chuckles but manages to put the right kind of pained experience in it. Then he looks sober. “You know how they explained people can’t remember who they are or people they knew but they can remember how to drive a car or fly an airplane?”

            She nods. She’s mesmerized. It doesn’t hurt that Sam glances back again and she gets a glimpse of those eyes and high cheekbones. Even sleepless, Sam is easy to look at.

            “He’s got some special skills he picked up in Afghanistan but, you know, also some, well, he was injured and when he’s anxious, there was some intestinal damage and solid food doesn’t always… ” Dean lowers his eyes. Shrugs like, ‘you know how it is.’ “We’re meeting the rest of a task force to go into this new zone. They need what he can do, you know?” Dean looks soulful. “But I worry when he gets like this.” He slides a twenty across the counter and explains about the magic of smoothies.

            The waitresses’ eyes are huge. She looks to be about twenty-four. By the time he’s finished, she’s on a mission.

            When he slides back into the booth his bacon is cold but who cares. He grins.

            Sam looks at him, eyebrows a little squished.

            Five minutes later a smoothie the size of a grain silo hits the table. “Are strawberries okay?” Lindsay the waitress asks.

            “Uh, yeah,” Sam says. “I like strawberries.”

            “It’s got frozen berries and a little strawberry yogurt and a banana,” she says. “And some protein powder. Is that okay? One of the line cooks drinks protein shakes and he said it’s good for you.”

            Sam looks bewildered. “That’s, um, really great,” he says. “I mean, you didn’t have to do this.”

            “Just a way to say thank you for your service,” she says. She flashes a triumphant smile at Dean.

            Dean puts his most patriotic face on. “Thank you,” he says.

            Sam looks at him and it’s a look that Dean knows. A pure Sam look. It’s a look that says ‘I am going to murder you in your sleep.’ It’s a look that makes him positively gleeful.

            “You could say thank you,” Dean says.

            “Yes, thank you,” Sam says.

            Twenty dollars is a lot for a smoothie, but totally worth it. And the fucker really has to drink it or feel guilty as hell.

 

            They get off the highway and travel country roads through Mule Shoe, Texas. The panhandle smells of crude oil and dust. Sam is still working on his smoothie. It’s almost gone. Dean still counts it as a win. Sam is watching out the window. “What are you thinking?” he asks all the sudden.

            Dean says, “I don’t think, Einstein. You do.”

            Sam continues to look out the window.

            Dean sighs. “Okay. I was thinking about how much you’re still you even though you don’t remember stuff and I was wondering what I’m like if I don’t remember stuff.”

            Sam looks at him. “You’re intensely loyal. You’re deeply depressed and have no insight or way to deal with it except alcohol and aggression so you seesaw between generosity and anger. Sometimes you’re incredibly intoxicating to be around.”

           “Oh,” Dean says. Because he doesn’t know what else to say. He’s pretty sure Sam with memories thought all that shit but wouldn’t say it to his face.

           “Do you want to do anything about the alcoholism?” Sam says to the window.

           “No,” Dean says.

           “Okay,” Sam says.

           Dean thinks about saying what the fuck. Sam is all about Dean and wanting Dean to drink less and eat his vegetables. Fourteen year old Sam nagged him into quitting smoking.

           Dean decides he doesn’t really want a lecture. He gets enough lectures.

           “What the fuck?” he says.

           Sam looks at him. “I’m figuring out who I am and it’s not pretty. Okay, it’s better than being a serial killer but still I don’t think I’m in a real position to tell you what to do. You’re kind of hard to be around some of the time but when I wasn’t around you, I didn’t like it and when I am around you I feel a lot better. You clearly want me around and I like that. I figure I should shut up, you know?”

           “Not exactly your style, Cinderella,” Dean says.

           “Sorry,” Sam says to the window. “Maybe I shouldn’t get my memories back.”

           Maybe not because yeah, you told me once that if I were dead you wouldn’t try to bring me back and that fucking hurt. But when I was a demon, you never stopped trying to bring me back. When you had a knife to my throat after I tried to bury a hammer in your head, you couldn’t keep it there and I tell myself it was because you saw Cas and knew he would stop me before I slit your throat because otherwise how do I sleep at night? Yeah, you didn’t search for me in Purgatory but maybe you’d been psychotic for a year and you were just broken. And when you were on your knees in front of me and I told you the best thing was for me was to kill you and you said, _okay, but when you come back to yourself and feel bad about that, I want you to remember you were a good man and here are the photographs to remind you._

            Fuck Sammy. I told _you_ that you should be on that funeral pyre instead of Charlie and you told _me_ I was a good man. I told you that if I wasn’t your brother I would hunt you. You told me I should eat more vegetables. It was my job to take care of you and it seems like all you want to do is die.

           “Holy shit,” Sam says.

             Ahead of them is The Darkness.

            “Finish your smoothie,” Dean says. Because really, what else was there to say?

 

            It is unnatural. A roiling wall of smoke, a cloud of dark fog that should not have been so static but is. It’s like a wall. Unnaturally unmoving but not motionless. Sam sucks the rest of his smoothie through the straw, opens his door and carefully puts it on the pavement. Sam never litters. Dean guesses that in the face of that wall of death and end of the world, littering in the Impala is the lesser sin than just plain littering.

            Dean gets out, pops the trunk and pulls the array of weapons he had picked before they left: angel blades, demon knife, iron, copper, silver, shotguns with salt, holy water, every kind of light source he can find. He doesn’t have much hope for most of them. He wishes they could have talked to the Navajo grandpa.

            “This is an angel blade,” he says. “Since angels battled The Darkness, I’m thinking it’s our best bet against anything we find in there.”

            “Okay,” Sam says.

            “Don’t touch the blade,” Dean says. “It doesn’t look sharp but it’s worse than a razor.”

            “Good to know.”

            “Also works on demons. Will work on Lucifer if you could get to him.”

            Sam studies it. “Can I keep it?”

            Dean grins. “Yeah. You can. But don’t sleep with it under your pillow. You’ll end up cutting yourself.” If they ever sleep in a bed again.

            Sam looks at the angel blade. “I’ll think about it.”

            “Other thing you need to know,” Dean says.

            “Yeah?” Sam says.

            “We’re something called soulmates.”

            Sam quirks an eyebrow.

            “Cas told us.” Dean finds himself studying some stupid dead weed on the side of the road. Anything but looking at Sam. “Most people, when they go to heaven, they get their own special heaven. It might seem like there are other people in it but really it’s their version of the perfect place. But we’re like, I dunno, special snowflakes. We share a heaven. We were never really meant to be apart or some shit.”

            There’s silence. When he finally looks at Sam, he’s trying not to smile.

            “What?” Dean says, feeling defensive.

            “You hate this,” Sam says.

            “It’s just a thing.”

            “You hate explaining this,” Sam says. He can’t not grin.

            “It sounds dorky.” Dean can feel himself cringing.

            “It’s not dorky,” Sam says. “It explains a lot.”

            “I just thought you should know,” Dean says. “In case something happens to one of us.”

            “The website says we’re ‘psychotically co-dependent’.”

            “Whatever,” Dean says.

            “Did you really kill Death?”

            “You skipped ahead. How do they even know about that?” Dean says. “How much of that did you read?”

            “All of it.”

            Dean figures there is nothing to do but drive into the dark.

#

            It is utterly normal inside the car but they can see nothing outside the car at all. It swirls around them like smoke. It is very disturbing. It feels so wrong. Sam doesn’t remember the Darkness when it first enveloped the car so he doesn’t know if that felt as awful but this feels like...like the absence of good. His first impulse is to say ‘stop’. He hears Dean’s intake of breath. Dean doesn’t stop. He drives a few feet in, maybe a couple of Impala lengths and the right front tire goes off the road with a thump.

            “Fuck,” Dean says.

            He flicks the Impala’s lights on and the lights don’t exactly illuminate so much as the stuff swirls away from them.

            “ _And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness_ ,” Sam murmurs.

            “So you can’t remember who I am but you can remember Genesis,” Dean says.

            Sam smiles a little. “Back up,” he says.

            The Impala lurches back onto the road and backs out of the stuff. In the light of normal day, Sam runs his hands through his hair, a nervous gesture he knows but can’t always stop. “I want my memories,” he says.

            Dean opens his mouth and Sam can see ‘No’ written all over him. Dean stops himself.

            “I can’t do this without being who I am.”

            “Oh, you’re Sam all right,” Dean says.

            Sam gets out of the car and walks to the front of it until he’s standing only a foot or so from the roiling mass. Dean comes to stand just behind him. This is something Sam knows that he caused to be released into the world. He gave the book to Rowena to translate. He got Dean to explain the book to him and although Dean never came out and said it, he could fill in the gaps in the story. There is a bunch of files on his laptop from Charlie and a history of emails from Charlie and when he asked Dean about her Dean could barely stand to say her name. He was afraid he was a serial killer but he’s killed more people than any serial killer. He really doesn’t deserve not to remember.

Sam closes his eyes. “Castiel,” he says, “I’m sorry to disturb you when so much is at stake but if you can, I would like you to come and restore my memories.”

            He opens his eyes and looks around. Dean is staring at him and he stares at Dean because where do you look when you’ve asked Cas to show up? Then they both stop looking at each other because, well, that’s awkward. He waits for the sound of wings.

            After a moment Dean says, “I guess he’s busy.” Dean is trying very hard not to look pleased about it.

            “Okay,” Sam says and shrugs. For a reason he can’t explain he really wants to say a prayer. He leans back against the hood of the Impala and closes his eyes. He wants very much to ask God to be with them in their time of need. He wants someone, anyone, to help him to do this right. He knows from reading the books that they are Team Free Will and all that and that they re-wrote fate but is it so wrong to ask for guidance?

            “Sam?” Dean asks.

            He opens his eyes and shakes his head. “Just thinking.”

            “Call the papers,” Dean mutters.

            “I’ve got an idea,” Sam says.

            Dean hates it and they argue for about twenty minutes but in the end Dean agrees to try it. They dig out the biggest, baddest camping lantern they have in the trunk and armed with that, the EMF detector, his 9mm, a shotgun cracked over his arm (he’s holding the EMF detector in his hand) angel blade, and holy water, Sam walks in front of the Impala into the Darkness. The idea is that the Impala provides some sort of retreat if they are attacked. “Like a rolling treehouse?” Dean says.

            Sam walks forward and the…mist or fog…or cloud parts in front of the light.

            The camping lantern combined with the Impala’s headlights creates a small area of clear in front of the Impala. The EMF reader occasionally ticks like a Geiger counter. The blackness/absence swallows the sound of his boots on the blacktop.

            He can walk about six feet ahead, lantern held up, feeling a little like Diogenes looking for an honest man. Or a train lineman or something.

            Dean has the window down on the Impala. “This sucks,” he says.

            “Yeah,” Sam says.

            “I keep expecting to see Pyramid Head,” Dean says.

            Sam looks back at the car. “Is that a monster?”

            “You should do something other than read books, nerd boy.”

            They walk for twenty or thirty minutes. Sam won’t let himself check his watch.

            “This is the stupidest idea ever,” Dean says. “Do you know how long it’s going to take to walk to Rowena?”

            “It’s a propane lantern,” Sam says. “If we strap it to the front of the Impala, it’ll blister the paint or something. Think of this as a reconnaissance mission.”

            “I’ve already figured out what I’m gonna do,” Dean says. “Light bars mounted on the roof and the bumper and a spotlight. I’m just not sure I want to use the Impala—”

            The EMF suddenly pegs and Sam puts it and the lantern down as fast as he can, the shotgun clattering to the road, drawing the angel blade and 9mm. Dean is shouting to get in the car when something gray and toothy comes from Sam’s left. He’s still crouched and the angel blade’s in his left hand so he fires and throws himself forward.

            Then he’s out of the circle of clear and blind in the blackness. He scrambles and something claws at him, drawing blood across his back. He grabs just above a gray ankle feeling bone and something dry and muscular and dusty and pulls as hard as he can and the thing goes off balance and tumbles towards the Impala’s hood.

            “SAM!” Dean is yelling. Dean can’t fire because he doesn’t know where Sam is.

            “HERE!” Sam yells. “DEAN, SHOOT!”

            He switches the angel blade to his right hand because he hasn’t seen anything even resembling blood and jabs hard at what might be the vicinity of a knee, hitting bone and feeling the solid jar of it all through his hand, wrist and arm. The thing isn’t making any noise. He can hear Dean’s .45, Dean emptying a clip and swearing.

            Sam gets to his feet and the thing is getting to its feet, thankfully hobbled by whatever damage he managed to inflict. He tries for its midsection and it reaches for him with claws that must be nine inches long. Then Dean’s machete hits it’s neck. Then again. Then a third time to take it’s head off.

            The head bounces off the hood of the Impala. Sam thinks that it had no eyes, just a couple of hollows where eyes would be.

            He can’t see Dean who is still in the cloud so he hauls the lantern up, the scratches in his back protesting. “Dean?”

            The lantern reveals his brother holding his shoulder with the same hand that has the machete. Dean is grimacing. Fear lances through Sam.

            “Get in the car!” Sam says. He grabs the EMF reader and shotgun and steps over the thing. “Back seat.”

            “Just dislocated. Again,” Dean says.  He's white with pain.

            “Get in the car,” Sam snarls. He is more afraid now than he was when the thing was attacking him. Of course, it’s the after affects of adrenaline. He also realizes he knows what to do for a dislocated shoulder. And that it hurts like a mother.

            He gets into the other side of the back seat.

            “What was that?” Dean asks.

            Sam shrugs and says, “An other injuries?”

            Dean shakes his head. Sam runs his fingers over Dean’s skull anyway, and across his ribs.

            “Fuck Sam,” Dean says, “I’m okay, just get it back.”

            “Okay,” Sam says. “How you want to do this?”

            “Give me a three count,” Dean says.

            Takes a moment for Sam to figure out what he means. Sam takes Dean’s arm, pulls it into position to relocate the shoulder and Dean winces. “Okay then,” Sam says. “On three. One—” and he pulls figuring it will be better to just get through it before Dean expects it.

            Dean yells. Sam feels the shoulder slide back in.

            “Damn,” Dean says. “I thought this time you’d really do it on three.”

            Sam doesn’t understand.

            “And you think you need your memories back,” Dean says. He rotates his shoulder a bit and grimaces. “That’s it, we’re leaving. But I totally get to name that thing.”

            “Sure.” Sam was thinking it looked a little like a blind gargoyle and is happy to suggest the name.

            “Electric Light Orchestras. We can call them ELOs for short.” Dean grins.

            “Is this another joke I don’t get?” Sam says.

            Dean says, “Not particularly. I just hate Electric Light Orchestra. What kind of self respecting band has a string section?”

            Dean gets all torqued about the scratches on Sam’s back. The thirty minutes it takes them to get back out of the Darkness are nerve wracking. They get a room in a motel and Dean promises that if Sam eats all his chicken not only will Dean let him go for a run but he’ll try calling Cas for him. It makes Sam laugh and Dean says that before he lost his memories he’d have been offended.

            “I sound like I’m mostly a righteous prick.”

            He kind of expects Dean to say it isn’t true. Dean says, “Ah, Sammy, you just need to get laid more.”


	11. Atonement

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Okay,” Sam says, “Sit up?” Dean allows Sam to help him up and they have Teagan find a bottle of Pedialyte in the back. Sam explains to Teagan that when someone loses blood it’s important to hydrate and Pedialyte and Gatorade both have electrolytes but even water is good.
> 
> “Pedialyte isn’t as good as the blue Gatorade,” Dean says.
> 
> “Frost,” Cary corrects from the back.
> 
> Dean sips Pedialyte while Sam is driving and Fritz is giving Sam directions.
> 
> “Dean,” Sam says. “We’re going to carry you.”
> 
> “I can walk,” Dean says. “You just help.”
> 
> “I can sing,” Sam says, “but it’s not pretty and neither is your walking. We’re going to do the old chair carry, okay? Put your good arm across Fritz’ shoulder.”

 

 

            It’s four days before they’re ready to go back into the Darkness and by that time there are more places covered in the same blankness.

            Castiel has not answered their calls. Sam is…Dean doesn’t know what Sam is. Dean buys a Ford Explorer that he names The Full OJ and at a local mechanic’s place, mounts his lightbars on the roof and the front bumper. Sam helps—hands him tools, holds things, fetches beers. He talks less and less. He does the quiet smile thing a lot. It’s the New Sam expression. When Dean gets irritated at Sam or does something that should irritate Sam, he gets an ‘Okay,’ or the quiet smile back at him. It drives him crazy.

            It’s the opposite of when he dislocated his shoulder in the fight with the ELO. That was full on Sam. From the way Sam ordered him into the car to the not waiting until the count of three to the checking him for other injuries. It was as familiar as Sam’s hair.  

            Crowley calls. On his phone.

            “What,” Dean says.

            “Dean,” Crowley says. “Don’t you miss me? You used to love when I called.”

            “Fuck off,” Dean says and hangs up.

            The phone rings again and he almost doesn’t answer.

            “Look,” Crowley says, “I just wanted you to know that they’ve got Luci occupied so there won’t be surprise dates with your brother.”

            Dean grits his teeth. He is not going to say thank you for the news of Lucifer.

            “No love for that tidbit?” Crowley asks. “How is the Holy Sam?”

            “I’m going to hang up,” Dean says.

            “Word on the street is that you’re tracking my mother.”

            How does Crowley know that? Dean is at a garage working on the car.

            He can’t help but look around even though there’s no way to tell if there’s a demon around short of walking up to everybody and saying Christo.

            “We’ve formed an alliance with Heaven,” Crowley says. “Enemy of my enemy and all that. If you’d like to maybe share some information…”

            Dean hangs up. Then he shuts the phone off.

            Mounting the actual lightbars on the car hasn’t taken long, the hardest part has been rounding up everything he needed.     

            It’s when he’s finally finishing up the whole attack of the light brigade thing on the car that he figures out what is it about the Quiet Smile that is driving him nuts. It’s Crowley’s comment, ‘The Holy Sam’ that makes it click. Sam’s smile, his soft ‘okays’, they’re saintly. Positively martyred. It’s ‘I don’t deserve to be pissed at you.’ It’s not martyred the way some people do martyred, that holier-than-thou passive aggressive shit of moral superiority. The problem with Sam being martyred is that Sam has a history of really doing it. Jumping into Hell or The Trials or offering to let Dean take his head off with Death’s scythe.

            Dean is crouching in front of the bumper when this hits him. The realization stops him. Scares him.

            Sam is sitting in the waiting room with a book, having run out of things to be helpful about. The book, Dean notices, is in Spanish, something called _El Castillo Interior_ , by St. Teresa of Ávila. He is reading with a Spanish/English dictionary beside him.

            “Sam,” Dean says. “Lunch.”

            Sam looks up. “It’s 3:30 and we ate lunch.”

            “Whatever,” Dean says and grabs his brother and hauls him out the door.

            “Is this about eating?” Sam asks.

            “Get in the Impala,” Dean says. He drives them to a little hole in the wall bar. It’s trying to be a pub and failing. The food is burgers and bratwurst which is distinctly un-English and no one has ever used the dartboard on the back wall. There’s a juke box but it’s off and the place is depressingly silent. Dean points to a booth and gets them two draft beers. He sets one in front of Sam.

            Sam is looking at him like he has lost his mind. Normally Sam would know that Dean is on a tear about something and would already be on defense. One more reason Dean thinks Sam shouldn’t get his memory back but it’s an admittedly self-serving one. “What are you planning?” Dean says.

            “Planning?” Sam says. He looks genuinely bewildered.

            “Yeah, planning,” Dean says.

            “I’m not planning anything,” Sam says. “Except what we’ve talked about. Finding Rowena.”

            “Look,” Dean says, “I know this mood, Saint Samantha. This is your ‘I have to throw myself on the pyre’ mood.”

            “What?” Sam says. Now he really looks confused.

            “This is your ‘I’ve really fucked up and now I have to punish myself’ thing,” Dean says.

            That’s a silver bullet. Sam takes a hit with that one.

            “So what’s the deal?” Dean asks.

            Sam decides to take a sip of his beer, stalling. Then he says, “I’m not planning anything, Dean. Swear to God.”

            “Don’t bullshit a con man. You don’t remember shit, but I remember everything. I know when you feel bad because you remember when you locked yourself out in sixth grade and I got fired for leaving my job to go let you in. What’s going on?”

            “Nothing, man,” Sam says, but he can’t quite look at Dean. “Did you get fired because I locked myself out?”

            Dean ignores the attempt to derail the conversation. “So what is it? ‘Cause if you do something stupid I am going to kick your ass.” Dean isn’t quite sure what stupid thing Sam is concocting but that’s the problem with Sam. He is amazingly clever about the stupid ideas he gets. They can come out of far left field. “You can’t do a crossroads deal for something. As far as I can tell, you haven’t been researching a spell or something.”

            “I’m not doing anything!” Sam says. “I don’t even know what to do!”

            “Do about what?” Dean bores down.

            “Fix my mess!” Sam says. “Fix the Darkness!” Sam is loud enough that the bartender is looking at them. She’s not nice looking; more of the hard blond, middle-aged ‘don’t try anything in my bar’ type. The conversation is definitely weird. Not quite ‘let’s gank a werewolf’ weird, but weird.

            “He plays a lot of video games,” Dean says to her.

            She doesn’t even bother to nod. Just gives them the eye.

            Dean was thinking that Sam had something unexpected up his sleeve. But it’s really the oldest and simplest of Sam’s problems, ‘it’s my fault.’ Dean thinks he’s kind of a moron not to have realized that with no memory, Sam would go back to basics. “Look,” he says, “It’s not your mess.”

            “I know,” Sam says quietly.

            Bullshit. That’s a meaningless ‘I know.’ “I’m the one who got the mark,” Dean points out.

            “When most people screw up,” Sam says, “they do something like drive drunk and get in a car accident on the way home and kill one person. When I screw up, thousands—”

            “Shut up,” Dean snaps. “I’m not doing this again. Okay? We’re not, we can’t do this stuff anymore.” Sam nods but Dean knows, _knows_ he isn’t getting through. “Little brother,” he says. “Look at me.”

            Sam looks up, unwilling but unable not to.

            He doesn’t know what he’s going to say until the words come out of his mouth. “Don’t hurt me,” Dean says.

            “Hurt you,” Sam says. “I’d never want to hurt you.”

            Dean doesn’t know what to say to that because of course Sam doesn’t want to hurt him. That’s how it gets fucked up every time.

            “You hate all this,” Sam says. “All this talking.”

            Dean does. God he does. He isn’t getting through and it’s just making everything worse. “You think you’re the only one, Sammy. Like you up and invented all the world’s problems all by yourself. Give the rest of us a little credit too.”

            Sam looks as if he’s about to argue and then he gets this funny smile and starts to laugh.

            “What’s funny,” Dean says, suspicious.

            “You’re right. It is a little arrogant on my part.”

            Why this makes Sam happy is hard to tell but it clearly does.

 

            The next morning they eat breakfast. Sam is eating without fuss which is a good sign for whatever is going on in Sam’s head. Then they are in the Explorer and in no time, in front of the wall of roiling darkness. They have lots of extra gas stashed in the back. They have replacement lights. They have protein bars and Red Bull. They figure they will be in the cloud overnight.

            “This still sucks,” Dean says.

            “I miss the Impala,” Sam says.

            Dean does, too. He rolls forward. The lights work great. He gets twice as much of that clear space in front of the car and about three feet on either side, enough to allow him to see some sense of road. Last time he was following Sam’s blue flannel shirt, the top of Sam’s head almost disappearing into the stuff. Sam has a map spread on his lap. Navigating is going to be strange.

            “First turn off is going to be on the right,” Sam says. Dean edges the car to the right side of the road. The plan is to try to see street signs so they have some idea where they are. If they have to, they plan to use the spotlight.

            In a way it’s like being underwater. Dean hums “Yellow Submarine” to himself as he drives.

            Sam makes an amused sound.

            They pass their first body after about two hours of driving. It’s pretty slashed up, crumpled on the edge of the road, a sudden clump of dark dried blood and rags. It’s impossible to tell the gender. Dean has to slam on the brakes to keep from hitting it and Sam gasps out loud.

            Dean backs a bit and maneuvers around it. He doesn’t look at Sam.

            It takes them about seven hours to go a hundred miles and let’s just say having to stop to pee is…fraught with tension. Dean can’t help thinking, standing with his pants open, pissing into the darkness while Sam stands guard with an angel sword, that this would be a lousy way to die. He has sworn Sam to secrecy if in fact he goes this way.

            Dean’s shoulders ache like a mother from tension and he’s thinking of caving in and asking Sam to take over driving when almost out of their clear zone on the left side of the road (the next turn off is a left) he catches a glimpse of a child’s leg. A child walking. And as he does he hears a very little girl-like shriek. Dean slams on the brakes so hard that if he was going more than twenty miles an hour, Sam would be through the windshield. Instead Sam is out of the passenger door with an angel blade in one hand and reaching onto the roof to direct the spotlight. It can only cut through about fifteen or twenty feet of the dark crude but it picks out one, two, three, four, five, six people; a man, a couple of women, and three kids.

            “Hey!” Sam shouts.

            One of the women and the kids break into a run. Sam shouts, “Wait! We’re not monsters!” And then for good measure, “ _No somos monstruos!_ ” Sam’s Spanish is mostly menu and tourist stuff but figures that’s something he could whip out in an emergency.

            The man calls to the woman who ran and she comes back into the light. Dean can see now that the two kids are tied to her. Everyone has a long length of what looks like clothesline tied around their waist and the kids are tied to the women. Smart thinking.

            Sam must wave at them to come over because the man moves warily towards the Explorer. He looks like he’s in his fifties or sixties and has a hard, square, weathered face that makes Dean think of old Texas.

            “I’m Sam, this is my brother Dean,” Sam says. Dean can’t see anything but Sam’s legs, he’s standing on the edge of the passenger side so he can reach the spotlight on the roof. “You need to get out of here.”

           “Yeah,” the man says. “That’s some rig you’ve got.”

           “My brother figured it out,” Sam says. “He’s good with cars.”

           “I’m Fritz,” the man says. “That there’s Maria and Evie.” He raises his voice. “Bring the kids over.”

           Sam pulls the spotlight off the roof and slams the car door shut with his hip. He’s standing guard with the angel blade and the spotlight, searching the darkness.

           Dean opens his door and grabs his angel blade. He opens the back door and the kids climb in and then back to the third seat. “I’m afraid it’s going to be crowded,” he says.

          “Beats dying,” Fritz says. “Teagan,” he calls to the older girl; she looks about thirteen, still boyish, “watch your sister. Cary, get in the middle.” Cary is a boy about eight with dark hair and eyes and baggy purple shorts.

          Sam is shining the spotlight in long slow sweeps around the car. They’re making a fair amount of noise and that worries Dean.

          “Have you seen anything?” Dean asks.

          “Just bodies,” Fritz says.

          From the backseat Cary says, “Something ate Washington.”

          “Who’s Washington?” Dean asks.

          “Our cat,” says Teagan.

          The women, Maria and Evie, climb into the middle row of seats and Fritz follows them. Dean slams the door just as Sam says calmly, “Incoming.”

          Dean says, “Stay here.” He slams the driver’s side door.

          The things frozen in the spotlight are a lot like spiders. Pasty pale spiders the size of dogs. They have legs that arch up higher than their bodies and way more eyes than they should, three larger black ones all in a row and then above those a circle of tiny red ones almost like a little crown. They don’t have necks so they turn their whole bodies to look from Sam to Dean. What should be their front legs are actually arms that shade to leathery brown skin ending in almost human hands with black nails.

          Sam reaches for the door handle to open the passenger door and climb into the Explorer and the things scuttle forward. He turns to face them and they scuttle a bit back.

          “Sam?” Dean asks, coming carefully around the car to stand next to his brother. “Know anything about spider anatomy?”

          “No,” Sam says, without taking his eyes off of them. “Any guesses?”

          “I’m thinking that circle of eyes is like a target.”

          One of them flips a hand out and it’s got a lipless mouth in it’s palm that keeps moving and moving. Like it was mumbling or chewing or God knows what. Isn’t that just charming. A spider with a mouth in the palm of it’s hand. These things are the gift that just keeps on giving.

          “Fuck me, I hate my life,” Sam says.

          Dean can smell something. A sickly sweet, sour odor like rot and an undercurrent of almost vinegar. Who knew spiders smelled. Who cared?

          “Do you think they jump?” Sam asks.

          “Jeez, Sammy,” Dean says. “Did you have to ask that? Well, only one way to find out.” He pulls his .45 out left handed. Dad used to make them practice shooting with either hand. Neither of them is very good with their left but the damn things are only twenty feet away and he has all the time in the world to line up a shot. Straight for the big black eye in the middle—

           He hits slightly above it but solidly in the head but it doesn’t seem like it makes any difference. The spider things are fast, scuttling forward (but not jumping, thank god for small favors).

           Then they are using angel blades as the spider things leap at them. “Don’t get bit!” Dean yells, thinking of venom. Sam’s long arms are an advantage but the things are so fast, they move sideways and backwards as easily as they move forwards and it’s hard to get a sense of how they are going to go. He takes a leg off of the one he’s fighting, and then another. That becomes his plan, a steady battle of attrition. It oozes greenish fluid. Beside him, out of the corner of his eye he sees Sam raise his blade and come straight down right in the center of the circle of red eyes, the target, except at that moment his spider makes a suicide move to slash Sammy open.

            Dean, not expecting the thing to drop it’s guard that way, to let him cut off it’s arm and all the legs on that side, is caught on his back foot. He realizes that Sam’s blade is stuck in the other spider.

            Dean throws himself forward and feels a razor edged leg rip across his chest as his weight throws the thing on it’s back.

            An instant later Sam is lifting him up by his jacket and ramming the angel blade through the abdomen of the beast.

            Sam yanks the passenger door open and drags Dean into the seat. “Pull in your legs,” he gasps to Dean, and Dean manages to pull his legs in although he’s seeing black from the pain.

            He’s half across the seat when Sammy slams the door. He hears Sam get in the driver’s side and then feels hands on his shirt.

            “There’s a green tool box behind the kid’s seat,” Sam says. “It’s first aid.” Then quietly, calmly, “Let go, Dean. Let go of my hands, let me see.” Dean realizes he’s grabbed Sammy’s hands to keep him from touching Dean’s chest because it hurts.

            One of the girls says in a small voice, “He’s bleeding.”

            “Hand me the tool box,” one of the women says.

            Dean’s vision is starting to come back a little. He can see the inside roof of the car now. It’s light blue.

            Sam is ripping open his t-shirt.

            “I like this t-shirt,” Dean growls.

            “Then you shouldn’t have gotten spider guts on it,” Sam says. “Pressure,” he says. Then he puts a handtowel (stolen from motel) against Dean’s chest and it hurts like a “Motherfucker,” Dean says.

            “Don’t swear in front of the kids,” Sam says. “You’re bleeding a lot. This one’s gonna scar.”

            “Tell Cary chicks dig scars,” Dean says.

            “You hear that Cary?” Sam says.

            “Yeah,” Dean hears Cary say.

            “I don’t know if you should pay too much attention to a guy with spider guts all over his shirt,” Sam says. He’s sounding loose and cool but his hands are telling a bit of a tenser story.

            “Is he going to be all right?” one of the girls asks. Dean can’t tell their voices apart. Also, he is starting to feel sick from the blood loss and pain so it’s getting a little less important to pay attention. And the shifter knob is in his back and his head is on Sam’s lap, not the most comfortable position.

            One of the women says, “He’ll be all right, baby.”

            “Why is there whiskey in the first aid?”

            “Sometimes it can help with the pain,” Sam says. “Irrigating,” he says quietly to Dean. The towel lifts and someone in the back seat makes a disturbed kind of noise and then Dean makes an unhappy noise when Sam starts squirting water against the cut. “The solution to pollution is dilution,” Sam quotes. “Dude, you’re bleeding a lot. Gonna have to tie off some of these. I’m going to try some epinephrine. Hold pressure for me?”

            Dean thinks the hold pressure is to him but it turns out its to one of the women. She leans between the seats and pushes on the towel. Dean tries to smile at her and looks up at Sam who is upside-down from the way he is laying. Epinephrine is a local anesthetic that also reduces bleeding. They get it through a guy in Canada. He watches Sam load a syringe. When their Dad taught them field medicine it was mostly just pressure and stitch but Sam reads everything and could probably pass an EMT exam by now. Okay, maybe not, because Sam doesn’t give a rat’s ass about things like heart attacks and drug overdoses. Also, Sam has amnesia, which is getting harder and harder to remember. “You remember all this okay?” Dean asks.

            “Yeah,” Sam says. “Facts and procedural knowledge. You want me to call Cas?”

            “Try,” Dean whispers. He is feeling very sketchy about now.

            Sam closes his eyes. Dean wonders where Cas could fit in the car.

            “Who is Cas?” Fritz asks.

            Sam opens his eyes. “Castiel is an Angel of the Lord,” he says. “He raised Dean from perdition and has taken a special interest in him ever since.”

            This is met with silence.

            After a moment Fritz says, “You’re shittin’ me, boy.”

            “Not so much,” Dean says. “Feeling sick, Sam.”

            “Tell me if you’re going to throw up and I’ll roll you on your side,” Sam says. “Maria, is there a plastic bag back there?” Sam strokes his hair. “You’re going to be okay, dude. I don’t think Cas can hear.”

            “Okay, Doctor Oz, do your thing.”

            “Maria,” Sam says, “I’m going to tie off a couple of blood vessels and put some stitches in. Would you do me a favor and keep Dean talking? I want him to stay conscious if he can. You can ask him questions about Led Zeppelin. Who the members of the band are, what instruments they play, what his favorite songs are, things like that.”

            “Okay,” Maria says. “Which band is that? I mean, I’ve heard of them, they are like the ones that did that song,” and she starts singing, “The gig is up, the news is out, da-da da-da da da.”

            “That’s Styx,” Dean says. “Led Zeppelin is ‘Stairway to Heaven’.”

            “Gonna burn a little.” Sam starts giving little injections of the local.

            “Oh, they didn’t do like a criminal song?”

            Dean tries to think of a criminal song that Led Zeppelin did. “They did a song called ‘Hangman’,” he manages.

            “Yeah,” she says, “That one. I always mix that one and the renegade one up. So what’s the big difference between Styx and Led Zeppelin?”

            “Blues,” Dean hisses.

            By the time Sam has Maria open up the Vicryl suture and the suture needle and starts stitches, Dean is fighting to keep from blacking out and incoherently trying to explain John Bottom’s double pedal on the kick drum which to be honest he never really understood when he wasn’t in pain. Sam finally stops and he lets Dean just be there for awhile.

            “That’s cool,” one of the girls says from the back seat.

            Sam laughs quietly.

            Maria says, “You gonna be a doctor, Teagan?”

            “Okay,” Sam says, “Sit up?” Dean allows Sam to help him up and they have Teagan find a bottle of Pedialyte in the back. Sam explains to Teagan that when someone loses blood it’s important to hydrate and Pedialyte and Gatorade both have electrolytes but even water is good.

           “Pedialyte isn’t as good as the blue Gatorade,” Dean says.

           “Frost,” Cary corrects from the back.

           Dean sips Pedialyte while Sam is driving and Fritz is giving Sam directions.

           “Dean,” Sam says. “We’re going to carry you.”

           “I can walk,” Dean says. “You just help.”

           “I can sing,” Sam says, “but it’s not pretty and neither is your walking. We’re going to do the old chair carry, okay? Put your good arm across Fritz’ shoulder.”

           “Why not yours?”

           “Because I’m taller,” Sam says. “Fritz will be better.” They haul him out of the passenger seat and through the swirling darkness into a building. They sit him in…a pew?

           “What is this? Another church?” Dean says.

           “What’s wrong with churches?” Maria says.

           “I’ve had some strange experiences in churches,” Dean says. He refuses to be carried to a pallet of sleeping bag and blanket.

           “He needs an ER,” says Maria.

           Dean opens his eyes. “I’m fine,” he says. “Sammy’s great.”

           Sam rolls his eyes. “He needs to stop saving my ass. I’m going to help you sit up. Drink your Pedialyte.”

           Dean prefers Gatorade.

           “It's mostly blood loss,” Sam says to Maria as he lets himself drift. “He’ll really be in a lot better shape in a few hours.”

           “Salt the windows,” Dean says.

           “Go to sleep, Dean,” Sam says. Dean feels Sam’s fingers in his hair again so he does. Sam is there. So familiar to be woken and given fluids and eased back into sleep.

 

           He wakes in darkness. It’s a church, very small. Built of cinder block. He’s thirsty and his chest hurts but he’s not feverish and he’s not dizzy when he sits up. The people they picked up are all asleep, the kids in sleeping bags on pews, the adults in the aisles.

           He stands up, carefully. Checks to see if everything is place. They’ll have to take these people back and then make another try for Rowena. He wonders if kerosene would be a better weapon than angel blades against the spider critters.

           He looks for Sam and sees him in front of the altar. There’s a lantern on the alter which makes sense for lighting the church. It leaves the spaces between the pews in deep shadow. Sam is standing there with his head bowed. Sam used to pray but somewhere along the line he stopped. Finding out God has just left without telling anyone and isn’t answering anymore can do that for you. He wonders if having lost his memory, Sam is praying now.

           He walks to the front of the church. Sam is just going to tell him to go lay down again but honestly, he can’t sleep any more so he might as well keep his brother company.

           He’s about to say ‘Sam’ before he startles his brother because startling Sam can get you punched.

           Still facing the alter, Sam suddenly stiffens and reaches for his forehead. It’s a gesture that Dean hasn’t seen in years but he knows it even before Sam staggers and goes to his knees. It’s a vision.

           He’s got Sam’s arm. “Sammy,” he says, quietly so as not to wake anyone. “Sammy, look at me, what do you see?”

           Sam looks at Dean for just a moment, opens his mouth but then his eyes roll back in his head and a line of blood runs from his nose as he sags against Dean.

           Dean lowers Sam to the floor.  He wants to hold him up but he can feel the pull against his chest, against his stitches and he's still weak kneed.   Sam’s face softens and even as the blood runs black in the lantern light there is a feeling that begins to pervade the room like a scent. It’s a feeling of, for lack of a better term, holiness.

           It’s not normal. It’s not like anything that has happened before. Dean has spent some serious time around angels and he should know holy but really, angels have rarely struck him that way. This is something else. Sam’s face is marble white and smoothed of care. Transformed. Like the carvings of knights on tombs.

           God cannot have his brother. Fucking God has abandoned the world, he cannot now decide to take Dean’s little brother.

#

            It seems strange to Sam that the inside of buildings would be clear of the Darkness. Why would the Darkness respect inside and outside? But it does.

            Sam had salted the doors and windows, drawn a Devil’s Trap at the door, drawn what wards he could. Fritz had taken first watch and Evie had taken second. He’d given them Dean’s angel blade and cautioned them not to touch the business end, explaining that it didn’t look sharp and then cutting a piece of paper to show that it was. He’d laid down next to Dean and woken him every so often to drink more Pedialyte.

            He checks the wound under the dressing. It looks okay. Doesn’t look inflamed or weird. Dean stirred a little when he checked for fever but didn’t wake. He wonders what he’s forgotten because he’s doing it by rote. He knew a couple of different kinds of stitches—some that were figure eights, some that were at a ninety degree angle, and some that were deep circles into the wound. He’d done the deep ones on this wound. It was not so deep, no organs involved or anything like that, but it was a little jagged and that had seemed right.

            The kids had been scared at first but then had been fascinated.

            He walks the perimeter. He checks the salt.

            He ends up in front of the alter.

            He knows he’s stood watch before. He knows that it’s hard to stay awake that he needs to keep himself going.

            Latin. _Canticum David Dominus pascit me nihil mihi deerit_ … _A psalm of David, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want._ He lets the words run through him like water. _Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death_ … _sed et si ambulavero in valle mortis_ …

            God is not listening. They are Team Free Will; Dean and Castiel and him. God wanted them to prove something and they did, he thinks. But he’s feeling lost and while he doesn’t want people to make decisions for him, he wouldn’t mind a little guidance. He looks at the lantern on the alter, at the light, and he thinks, God, I go to a doctor when I’m sick because I don’t know everything. I’d really like if you’d stop asking me to be an expert here because I’m making a total fucking mess of it.

            He says an act of contrition. _Deus meus, ex toto corde poenitet me omnium meorum peccatorum…_ _My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart_. He’s supposed to be sorry for the pain he’s caused God but he’s mostly sorry for the pain he’s caused everybody. Especially Dean. As best he can figure out, Dean was all but programmed to take care of him and while he’s been wandering around on some sort of screwed up hero’s journey of trying and failing and then saving the world from the apocalypse and then screwing up again, Dean has been bearing the brunt of it. (Oh and all those people who died, mustn’t forget them.)

            The lantern brightens. It’s a propane camping lantern and he isn’t sure how much propane is left. Maybe they get brighter right before they run out? That doesn’t make any sense. The light gets stronger. The world is going white. He feels a pressure in his head, he doesn’t have any idea what it is, a kind of white darkness, and he is swallowed into it.

            His memories are in the whiteness. He remembers a little over thirty years of life on Earth. Not all of it, but the normal human round of childhood and adolescence. Stanford and hunting and all the things he had lost.

            In the whiteness he also finds the longer part of his life, almost two centuries in Hell. When he fell into the pit, Lucifer discarded Sam and his body almost immediately. The Cage was built to hold an angel, a creature of multiple dimensions, not a human. The Cage was non-Euclidian, non-relative. Time was not necessarily sequential. Space and mass did not behave. Sam had only the senses of a mortal and as he fell, the Morningstar ripped him open into a space where moving forward might mean he ended up somewhere else or not moving at all. Time might go forward or backward or stop. Sam could suddenly taste molecules except he had neither the receptors nor the places in his brain to make sense of what was happening and in the next instance those molecules might be the size of ham sandwiches and as impervious as stone and the very electrons circling the nucleus of the atoms in them might slow.

           He was psychotic within an instant. Shattered to fragments, eyes burned out, eardrums ruptured. The whole concept of ‘breaking’ was meaningless in the Cage. Lucifer rarely ‘tortured’ Sam. Lucifer despised humans because they were so limited. He had Michael, and Michael was multidimensional, and Lucifer’s relationship with Michael spanned millennia and was so complex it made Sam and Dean’s relationship seem simple. There was so much to argue in dimensions so improbable.

           It didn’t mean that Lucifer ignored Sam. The Morningstar had about the same relationship with Sam that a person would have with a game on their phone. Periodically in the roughly 180 years that Sam’s soul spent in the Cage, Lucifer would pick it up and play with it.

           Sam’s brain could only remember it all in metaphors of torture. Of insanity. Of _wrongness_. It all washed through him. Shook him like a terrier shakes a rat.

           His memories settle into him. There is something else.

           <Sam.>

           There is a vast and comforting presence in the whiteness and it speaks in a voice that feels familiar.

           Lucifer ran cold. This is…since Sam returned there has been some part of his soul that has never been warm. It is one of those things that is so constant that he has long stopped noticing it. He doesn’t even know it until now, when the whiteness warms him. He’s been aching for so long and that ache stops.

           He feels himself expand in a different way. He has a sense of himself, feeling himself having this experience, as if he can sense his Samness and yet he is also aware that everything is bigger than that. He feels himself opening up. In one way he can no longer identify the boundaries of himself, of his body. That should be terrifying. But for so long this body has controlled him, has been invaded, has been a vessel, has been possessed and violated and now it no longer defines him. But he is still himself, still Sam.

           All the thoughts and all the dears, all the chatter of his brain is momentarily silent and he feels euphoria.

           It sounds terribly banal, but he feels…love? Can he say that? Oneness? That maybe instead of everything being wrong there is a way that he can connect? He feels himself open up. He feels himself lose a grip on time and become timeless but in a way that feels right. As if he can feel himself as a small part of the alpha and omega, the beginning and then end.

          (Some small part of him is a little embarrassed at this. It’s kind of hippy-dippy. Whatever is in the whiteness is allowing this, is tolerant and doesn’t mind that Sam is who he is. And the part of him that is watching doesn’t mind either. When has Sam ever not felt loathing for Samness? But right now he sees that Samness and he thinks it is complicated and interesting and not all that bad.)

          He feels himself as a small part of the world. He sees the proverbial movement of a butterfly’s wings in China causing a storm in the United States and it makes him understand that he was the tip of the pressure and what he did mattered but that what a thousand, ten thousand, a million people did mattered.

          Really, it’s not all his fault. And it was kind of silly to think he was that important.

          And at the same time he was that important. Everybody is.

          This is heaven, Sam thinks. To be happy and to feel absolution and to feel connected.  Not that thing the angels run.  This is real heaven.

          <Am I dying? Sam asks.>

          <No, I’m sorry, Sam, but you have more to do. I will come to you again.>

          Which is okay because you know, Dean. He can’t leave Dean.

          <Who are you?  Sam asks>

          <You know.>

          <You’re God.>

          He feels it, that God is with him. God is speaking to him. Has chosen him. The boy with the demon blood.

#

            Dean sitting with his over-sized brother, holding Sam’s head against his chest, whispering to him. He’s terrified that Sam will start to seize.

            “Come back to me,” he whispers. “Sammy,” he calls. Sam’s face is open, his lips are slack. He almost looks as if he’s post-orgasm. Or dying.

            Sam’s eyelashes flutter.

            “Sam?” Dean says. “Sammy? I’m right here. I’ve got you.”

            Sam opens his eyes and unexpectedly he smiles. Not just a little, but a huge, happy full-dimple smile like Dean hasn’t seen in years. It’s joyful. Dean can’t remember when he’s seen Sam look so happy to see him, so happy to be alive.

            “Dean,” he says.

# # #

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I started writing this because I wanted to know what happened after the Darkness enveloped the Impala, of course. I liked the idea of Sam getting a break from the weight of experience—the original title for this was “Clean Slate”. As I wrote it, I realized that Dean is going to be Dean and Sam is going to be Sam even if they don’t remember what shaped them. I had planned for this to be an Armageddon fiction like the Croatoan fictions. Somehow it just never got there but I’m hoping you can see at the end of this that it’s possible that the Darkness may or may not be banished from this world. I would love to see fictions in a Darkness plagued world. (The world revealed in the series will of course be much different.)
> 
> I’d like to think that most of my version of Sam and Dean comes from the series (wouldn’t we all) and that while the story is not canon, the characters are pretty close. There is one piece of fanfic that has become head canon for my sense of Sam and that’s Sammehsayum’s Brittle http://sammehsayum.livejournal.com/5878.html It’s about Sam and the way he eats. Much of it feels as if it really is happening in between the scenes we see in the series. If you’re triggered by anorexia, I wouldn’t recommend it, but I’ve never read anything that so well captures the connection between food issues and controlling one’s life (and how really, food issues instead become a kind of cage.) Every time Sam orders a salad in the series, you’ll think of Brittle.
> 
> Sam and Dean are both really depressed people struggling to keep going and make the best they can out of it. Dean experiences it in one classic American male way which is anger and substance abuse. Dean drinks and fights and denies his pain on every level. He lives a risky life style and refuses to take care of himself. He’s a passive suicide—expecting not to live very long but not actively suicidal. Sam experiences it in a more traditional way in that he is often clearly sad, sometimes irritable, and leans towards the classically suicidal. Sam is rarely actively suicidal mostly because having died a lot, he knows that if he dies he either goes to Heaven or Hell and neither option offers what he wants. But Sam is really willing to die; from when he jumped into Hell, to the Trials, to the end of Season 10 when he knelt for Dean to kill him. Sam wants to atone for his sins in a very old school Christian way, by martyrdom. 
> 
> I don’t know Latin. Declensions—I really don’t have an interest in a language where you basically conjugate nouns. I was raised Catholic and although I stopped being Catholic when I was thirteen (my husband says I’m a ‘recovering Catholic’) just as Sam stopped thinking angels were the good guys when he met some of them, I have some knowledge of theology. Supernatural is a TV show and it’s first and foremost entertaining but some of the things it does with Heaven and Hell annoy me. One of the best things it ever did is the way Castiel was first introduced, as a being whose existence was too much for mortals to co-exist with. I don’t think the show would be half as entertaining if I was supposed to be in awe of Castiel all the time. I mean, The Pizza Man! But I’d like to be reminded now and again that there is a side to Heaven that is more like that original introduction. That Heaven is supposed to be the presence of God. That what Sam craves is something mystical and greater than the Heaven he and Dean have been shown, even of getting to hang in the Roadhouse for all of eternity. So I as I wrote this I found myself trying to create that. 
> 
> One of the more heartrending versions of Sam’s need is a series on Ao3 called Mashiach by Askance and Itsirtou http://archiveofourown.org/series/41208 in which Sam receives stigmata and Dean is all but destroyed by what for Sam is redemption. It does exactly what the best fanfic can. It explores something essential about the characters that the show never could. 
> 
> Sam is smart and he’s also taller than Dean whic gives him certain physical advantages but I think people forget that when push comes to shove, Dean is the better hunter. I wanted very much to remind everyone of that. Dean has killed Death and I can’t imagine that there is much left in the supernatural world that really wants to face Dean Winchester any more. Dean is given short shrift in Sam fictions and this is really a Sam fiction, but I really wanted to give Dean his full weight as someone who was given too much responsibility too soon and has been asked to much. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading.


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